Trump, Garland and the FBI

Given a president’s broad constitutional authority over the handling of information related to the country’s defense, it is not clear how Justice can make a case against Mr. Trump for documents he ordered to be sent from the White House while he was still in office. This column will go out on a limb and assume that once the Biden administration commenced, Mr. Trump was not allowed to roam around the West Wing stuffing materials into boxes bound for Mar-a-Lago. For any decisions Mr. Trump made regarding classified information while he was still serving as president, he held very broad authority. As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1988:

The President, after all, is the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” U.S. Const., Art. II, § 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security… flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.

A president is not bound by the executive orders of his predecessors. He is free to give his own. This may devolve into another argument about whether Mr. Trump is honoring political custom, but this is a matter of law and specifically an unprecedented warrant sought and executed by the Biden Justice Department, which presumably claimed to the affirming judge that agents were likely to find evidence of a crime—not merely a violation of alleged Beltway “norms”—at the Trump residence.

Emerging details on the FBI’s execution of this warrant only add to questions on whether it was appropriate and necessary, as Mr. Garland suggested it was. The Journal’s Alex Leary, Aruna Viswanatha and Sadie Gurman report:

Around lunchtime on June 3, a senior Justice Department national security supervisor and three FBI agents arrived at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida to discuss boxes with government records sitting in a basement storage room along with suits, sweaters and golf shoes.

A few days later, the FBI sent a note asking that a stronger lock be installed on the storage room door, signing off: “Thank you. Very truly yours, Jay Bratt, chief of counterintelligence and export control section.”

Does this sound like cause for obtaining an unprecedented warrant to search the home of a former president and then descending unannounced with numerous agents? The Journal report lays out the broad timeline:

The controversy began after Mr. Trump left office, when the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to his team to ask for what it thought were missing records. All official documents are required to be turned over under the Watergate-era Presidential Records Act.

The Archives in January retrieved 15 boxes of documents and other items from Mar-a-Lago.

The boxes contained some documents archives officials described only as “classified national security information,” prompting them to refer the matter to the Justice Department for investigation.

Aides to Mr. Trump have said they had been cooperating with the department to get the matter settled. The former president even popped into the June 3 meeting at Mar-a-Lago, shaking hands. “I appreciate the job you’re doing,” he said, according to a person familiar with the exchange. “Anything you need, let us know.”

Five days later, Trump attorney Evan Corcoran received an email from Mr. Bratt, the chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section, who oversees investigations involving classified information.

“We ask that the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured and that all the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice,” according to what was read to The Wall Street Journal over the phone.

Mr. Corcoran wrote back, “Jay, thank you. I write to acknowledge receipt of this letter. With best regards, Evan.” By the next day, according to a person familiar with the events, a larger lock was placed on the door. It was the last communication between the men until Monday’s search of Mar-a-Lago, according to the person.

On June 22, the Trump Organization, the name for Mr. Trump’s family business, received a subpoena for surveillance footage from cameras at Mar-a-Lago. That footage was turned over, according to an official.

On a sunny Monday morning, Aug. 8, a new set of agents arrived and began a search for documents at around 9 a.m. The warrant, signed by a judge in Palm Beach County, refers to the Presidential Records Act and possible violation of law over handling of classified information, according to Christina Bobb, a lawyer for the former president. The warrant hasn’t been made public by Mr. Trump nor has the inventory of documents retrieved by the government.

Now there are even more questions—besides the obvious ones—of why the magistrate judge would sign such a warrant. Rafael Olmeda reports for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

The U.S. magistrate judge who signed off on the warrant allowing the FBI to search Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home recently took himself off the former president’s defamation lawsuit against political rival

Hillary Clinton

and critic Adam Schiff.

Bruce Reinhart is a former federal prosecutor who was appointed to the bench in 2018 by the judges of the Southern District of Florida, a body of up to 18 jurists appointed by the president. Last March, when Trump sued Clinton over her claims that he was compromised by Russia, Reinhart drew the case and held onto it for a couple of months before recusing himself without explanation.

“He was actually wonderful,” said Peter Tiktin, who is representing Trump in the lawsuit. “I liked him because he was pretty sharp and seemed to be fair to both sides.”

At least two other judges have removed themselves from the case, which is pending a defense motion to dismiss, Tiktin said.

Tiktin said he suspects Reinhart had little choice but to sign the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, but the attorney reserved his criticism for the FBI agents who sought the warrant, not the judge who signed it. “I think he felt it was the right thing that he needed to do, even though it was the wrong thing for the FBI to do,” he said.

Maybe this judge really is wonderful. But on top of all the questions about the need for an unprecedented search of a former president’s home, there is also the need for an explanation of why he had to recuse himself from a case between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton but not from a case pitting Mr. Trump against the Biden administration.

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Mr. Freeman will host “WSJ at Large” Friday at 7:30 p.m. EDT on the Fox Business Network. The program repeats at 9:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. EDT on Saturday and Sunday.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Tony Lima.)