Trump team searches two of his properties amid court battle with DOJ

Trump’s legal team hired an outside firm to carry out the search of his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and, more recently, Trump Tower in New York, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

The team also offered the FBI the opportunity to observe the search, but the offer was declined, the people said. It would be unusual for federal agents to monitor a search of someone’s property conducted by anyone other than another law enforcement agency. Federal authorities have already searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s primary residence, and he spends almost all of his time at those three properties, advisers say.

Trump’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that the outside team did not turn up any new classified information during their search, according to people familiar with the process, and have said they utilized a firm that had expertise in searching for documents.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

“President Trump and his counsel continue to be cooperative and transparent,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said, accusing the Justice Department of committing an “unprecedented” and “unwarranted attack” against Trump and his family.

Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell told Trump’s legal team to continue to search for documents after the Justice Department expressed concerns that the team had not fully complied with a subpoena earlier this year. Howell, according to people familiar with the matter, did not give specific orders on how a search should be done.

The group first conducted a search of Bedminster, and Trump’s attorneys have now attested to the Justice Department that no further materials were found, two people familiar with the matter said.

Howell’s instructions followed a breakdown in the government’s trust in Trump’s attorneys that led prosecutors in August to seek a court-authorized FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Since that time, prosecutors have continued to question whether Trump has returned all materials with classification markings, although what steps the government might take to retrieve such materials or procedures it might require Trump’s advisers and lawyers to implement remain unclear.

Trump’s team has sought to avoid another high-profile search of his properties, the people familiar with the matter said.

According to the people, at least one of Trump’s lawyers has previously advocated for a less aggressive approach to the Justice Department investigation of Trump and his advisers for three potential crimes: mishandling of national security secrets, obstruction and destruction of government records.

That attorney, former Florida solicitor general Christopher Kise, had proposed such a search months earlier. Many of the other lawyers on Trump’s team have rebuffed Kise’s advice, and he has taken a reduced role in the classified documents case while taking a larger role in the New York investigations into the former president, the people said.

Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section at the Justice Department, communicated to Trump’s lawyers after the FBI search that the department was concerned Trump still may not have returned all the classified documents in his possession. The Washington Post has previously reported that officials at the National Archives also believe that there may still be more records missing. Previous attempts by Trump’s attorneys to identify and return documents proved unsatisfactory to investigators.

At times in the past, Trump has misled his own lawyers as to what was in the boxes that were taken from Mar-a-Lago, The Post has reported.

For example, he told some on his team that he only possessed newspaper clippings and personal items in 2021. One of his former lawyers, Alex Cannon, declined Trump’s entreaty to tell the National Archives he had returned all items because Cannon was not sure if it was true, and his team in February did not release a statement dictated by Trump that claimed he had returned all materials, The Post has reported.

Trump lawyers Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran met with investigators in June, handing over a taped-up folder of 38 documents collected from the former president’s residence in response to a May subpoena, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter. Prosecutors called the response “incomplete” in court documents and said that they collected evidence of “obstructive conduct” regarding the failure to fully comply with the subpoena.

Bobb signed a certification swearing that she had been told that “a diligent search” was conducted of boxes of records shipped from the White House to Florida when Trump left office, and that the file handed over to investigators contained “all documents that are responsive to the subpoena.” Corcoran told the visiting investigators he had been advised that all available boxes placed in a storage room — and nowhere else — had been searched in response to the subpoena, The Post reported.

Soon after, investigators obtained video surveillance of the club and conducted more interviews with Trump staffers, leading them to seek a search warrant from a judge on the basis of new evidence that sensitive material still remained at Mar-a-Lago, The Post has reported. When agents executed the search warrant in August, they found additional documents with classified markings in the storage room and in Trump’s office, along with thousands of other government papers and items, according to court records.

Perry Stein contributed to this report.