What led up to the FBI's raid of Mar-a-Lago

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The FBI’s raid of former president Donald Trump’s Florida estate and club, Mar-a-Lago, seemed to be a stealth operation – until, at least, Trump released a statement on Aug. 8 decrying the “siege,” as he called it.

There’s a complicated legal background and history that set the stage for the FBI’s search for boxes of classified materials that Trump took from the White House and never delivered to the National Archives. In one story today, presidency scholar Shannon Bow O'Brien explains how the presidential archives work.

And in today’s lead story, Georgia State University scholar Clark Cunningham explains the different legal and policy barriers the FBI and the Department of Justice had to overcome – and why the investigators could have walked away with more than what they were expecting.

“There seems little doubt that the Justice Department had compelling, perhaps overwhelming, legal justifications for conducting this unprecedented search of a former president’s home,” Clark writes.

Also today:

Amy Lieberman

Politics + Society Editor

Palm Beach police officers stand near the Florida home of former President Donald Trump on Aug. 8, 2022. Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images

Why searching an ex-president’s estate is not easily done – 4 important things to know about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago

Clark D. Cunningham, Georgia State University

There’s a high bar for a federal judge to grant a search warrant, indicating there is probable cause that Trump committed a crime by holding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

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