- Trump on Sunday demanded the return of some documents taken in the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
- He made the request in a Truth Social post, appearing to mistakenly think it had legal force.
- Trump was reacting to a Fox story claiming some documents taken may be privileged.
President Donald Trump over the weekend made a demand for documents taken by the FBI to be returned to him — but via a Truth Social post rather than his lawyers.
The former president made the demand on Sunday. It seemed worded as if Trump expected it to have legal force.
“Oh great!,” Trump wrote. “It has just been learned that the FBI, in its now famous raid of Mar-a-Lago, took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken. By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!”
Truth Social — effectively a clone of Twitter with a MAGA sensibility — refers to individual posts as “truths,” and the retweet equivalent is to “retruth” a message.
The documents Trump asked to be returned are ones he claims are covered by attorney-client privilege, and also executive privilege from when he was in office. Neither Trump nor the Department of Justice immediately responded to Insider’s request for comment.
The nature of the documents is unclear. Trump appeared to be responding to a Fox News story which identified five boxes and one further set of documents as being potentially protected. The six entries are the ones seen below:
United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Fox did not name its sources for the story, which also described interactions between the Department of Justice and Trump’s legal team.
Posting on social media, as Trump did, is not generally considered a valid way to make a legal request.
Insider was not able to locate any public documents making a formal version of Trump’s request. The Fox story did, however, describe a more timid version of Trump’s camp seeking the return of some files.
It said that Trump’s lawyers had asked the DOJ whether it would support the court appointing an independent official to review the records in question. Per Fox, the DOJ said no.
In another reaction to the raid, Trump said on Friday that any classified documents he took with him from the White House were anyway automatically declassified by a standing order he had set up.
He told Fox News: “Everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time. American presidents are no different.”
Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, called the claim “baloney.” He argued that declassification is a lengthy and complicated process. Former Justice Department lawyer Tom Dupree confirmed that there is a process to be followed, and it is unclear if that happened, he told the BBC.
Trump’s supporters have made increasingly outlandish calls in reaction to the raid, including Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky calling for the repeal of the Espionage Act, one of three statutes Trump is suspected to have violated.
Meanwhile, several far-right members of the GOP have also taken aim at the FBI, with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling to defund the agency, while Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert called for the raid to be investigated. Executive privilege is not necessarily a protection here, either.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism