After FBI agents carted away about a dozen boxes of presidential records from Donald Trump’s opulent Mar-a-Lago residence, the question hanging over that mountain of paperwork is: What kind of criminal case is the Justice Department building against him?
Federal authorities are focusing not only on whether the former president violated a law requiring him to turn over almost all of his White House documents to the National Archives, but also on whether Trump mishandled classified documents found at his Palm Beach resort.
Legal experts, including former federal prosecutors, say that the Justice Department and FBI would never have obtained a search warrant and launched such an unprecedented raid on a former president’s home Monday unless Trump was suspected of committing a crime or possibly letting classified documents on national security circulate at Mar-a-Lago.
