Former President Donald Trump and his legal team filed a motion this Monday to have an independent review of the alleged classified documents recovered by the FBI during its raid on Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.
The motion called the raid "unprecedented" and "unnecessary," adding that it was an action taken just months before the 2022 midterm elections "aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump."
Trump said Monday evening that the motion is "strongly asserting" his rights, "including under the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution, regarding the unnecessary, unwarranted, and unAmerican Break-In by dozens of FBI agents, and others, of my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida."
"They demanded that the security cameras be turned off, a request we rightfully denied. They prevented my attorneys from observing what was being taken in the raid, saying 'absolutely not,'" Trump said in a statement. "They took documents covered by attorney-client and executive privilege, which is not allowed. They took my passports. They even brought a ‘safe cracker’ and successfully broke into my personal safe, which revealed…nothing!"
Trump said he is "now demanding that the Department of 'Justice' be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home."
Speaking on CNN this Tuesday, former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said the motion had segments that "didn't even contain a legal argument at all" and were likely just included for "PR purposes."
"It does not even appear to have been filed in an appropriate way ... he makes 4th Amendment arguments before he's a criminal defendant, he's asserting executive privilege against the executive branch -- it's hard to understand how you're asserting executive privilege against the executive branch for seizing documents that belong to it, itself," Mariotti said.
Watch the full segment below:
