A former law clerk for Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch blasted the Department of Justice during a Fox News appearance Friday after a federal magistrate judge released the heavily redacted affidavit that led to the Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago.
“This affidavit, heavily redacted affidavit, it further evidences that this home raid on President Trump was unprecedented, it was unnecessary, and it was unlawful,” Mike Davis, of the Article 3 Project and a former law clerk Gorsuch during the justice’s time as an appellate court judge, said. “And again, what I’ve been saying since August 8th, the president has the absolute constitutional authority to declassify anything he wants for any reason he wants and he doesn’t have to get permission from any bureaucrat at the National Archives to do that. That is confirmed by a 1988 Supreme Court case, Department of the Navy versus Egan. So, there goes the underlying potential charge for espionage that was in this warrant.” (RELATED: ‘Destruction Of Trust’: Martha MacCallum Picks Apart FBI’s History Of Transparency)
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“Second point, the president has the sole statutory authority to make the determination whether a record is a personal record that belongs to him or a presidential record that goes to the bureaucrats at the national archives and almost certainly gets sent back to the president to put in the former president’s library and that is confirmed by a 2012 decision by an Obama judge,” Davis continued.
FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate owned by former President Donald Trump, to execute a search warrant as part of an investigation into allegations surrounding classified materials reportedly removed from the White House when Trump left office in January 2021. Republicans vowed to investigate the Department of Justice, blasting the raid as an “abuse of power” by the Biden administration.
“If he had weeks to deliberate, why didn’t Attorney General Merrick Garland get an opinion from the Department of Justice office of legal counsel or OLC?” Davis asked.
“This was a political raid,” Davis said.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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