The FBI and Department of Justice have "routinely abused their power," is the only way to explain the latest claims by former President Donald Trump that the FBI seized his passports during the Aug. 8 raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, Christina Bobb, one of his attorneys handling negations with the DOJ tells Newsmax.
"The warrant was very specific that it was looking for presidential records and classified information," Bobb said Monday on "Rob Schmitt Tonight." The passports do not fall into either of those categories, she said.
"It goes to show that they've just gotten too comfortable overstepping their authority, and they did it again,' Bobb said.
Asked if the DOJ fears Trump will try to flee the country, Bobb noted that even if that were the case, seizing a passport is not the proper means to do so, which requires a court order.
"You can't just say, 'Oh, we're going to raid his house, and, oh, by the way, let's take his passport.' ... they're just after anything they can get."
Politico reporter Kyle Cheney tweeted late Monday that a DOJ "filter team" discovered the passports while weeding out privileged information, which it described as two expired and one current diplomatic passport. The DOJ offered them back to Trump's team, it said, after which, he publicized that they had been taken.
Turning to press reports that Trump was keeping nuclear launch codes at Mar-a-Lago, Bobb said the legal team said they first heard about such claims three days after the raid.
"If it was so pertinent and so important, why didn't they tell us about it when we were negotiating with them and trying to give them everything they wanted?" she said. "And to my knowledge, we did give them everything they wanted."
The fact that the story was leaked to the press three days later, she said, "looks like they're just trying to come up with a story that was salacious enough to scare the American public into thinking maybe their actions were OK. They weren't."
Trump also said recently that some of the materials seized in the raid were subject to attorney-client privilege.
Bobb told Schmitt that FBI agents gave lawyers on the scene two separate receipts of property, a shorter and longer list. Bobb said that when they handed her the shorter list they told her verbally that it had attorney-client information on it so they would handle it differently and work that process out with the lawyers.
"But, of course, you know they write out classified information on the one list, and then when they take something that is questionable and the public won't like, they leave that off of the list and just tell me," she said, "So I think it's a lot of gamesmanship.
"I think what they did is wrong. It's illegal. It's unconstitutional, and I think they have a lot of explaining to do."
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