Chad Mizelle, a former senior Justice Department official who served as chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, dropped a bombshell this week. He reviewed emails showing that Joe Biden's White House Counsel's Office coordinated directly with Merrick Garland's DOJ and the National Archives ahead of the FBI's Aug. 8, 2022, raid on President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home. Then, right in the middle of the email chain, a White House staffer suggested taking discussions “offline,” and the paper trail vanished.
“They were talking about it. They’re talking about documents. They were looping in NARA, essentially the archives, who is the custodian for these documents, and continuing to talk about it until at one point, somebody says — I think it was the White House person, ‘Hey, why don’t we take this offline,'” Mizelle told the New York Post.
“And then all of a sudden every email communication on this thing stops,” he continued. “It made it very clear that the White House was involved. The White House knew about it. The White House not only knew about it, but they were also coordinating it. They were putting DOJ in touch with NARA specifically regarding these documents in Mar-a-Lago.”
A source familiar with the emails confirmed to The Post that the conversations Mizelle referenced exist. The Post has not independently reviewed the documents.
Internal FBI and DOJ communications released Tuesday by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) highlight how the bureau in the weeks before the raid did not believe agents had probable cause to execute the search warrant — but DOJ officials and former special counsel Jack Smith’s team overrode them in the dispute.
Washington Field Office Assistant Director in Charge Steven D’Antuono was among several FBI officials opposed to the search warrant — while Smith’s deputy Jay Bratt was in favor of executing it, with Garland giving the final approval.
This flies in the face of everything the Biden crew claimed. They swore Biden knew nothing and that the White House wasn’t involved. Karine Jean-Pierre spent much of the following day dodging questions about it during the White House daily press briefing.
As PJ Media previously reported, the FBI knew there wasn’t probable cause for the raid. Nevertheless, Jack Smith's deputy Jay Bratt pushed ahead, and Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland signed off on it.
Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Christopher Kise, flagged coordination early. In a Jan. 16, 2024, filing, they demanded all communications related to the Mar-a-Lago search, noting that the White House Counsel’s Office was working alongside NARA, DOJ, and the FBI, and acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall’s May 10, 2022, letter referenced talks with the president’s counsel before demanding documents back. A grand jury subpoena came the next day, and Trump’s team turned over papers on June 3. Jack Smith’s prosecutors later claimed Biden White House involvement was minimal and mostly pre-DOJ in 2021, while conveniently withholding some DOJ emails as privileged.
NARA referred the matter of the missing documents to the Justice Department in February 2022, and Garland authorized a criminal investigation the following month.
Mizelle said the emails he reviewed “completely undermine” the claim “that the White House was not in any way involved in the decision to raid the president’s house.”
“What is offensive to me here is the hypocrisy of saying under no circumstances was the White House involved when they were in fact involved, and now we have email records to prove it,” he fumed. “They coordinated what became a raid on the former president’s home and then lied about it.”
Folks, this reeks of election interference dressed as justice. Biden's people railed against Trump for years, then orchestrated a home invasion, while repeating over and over, “no one is above the law.” They hid behind "independence" while pulling strings, then took it “offline” to dodge accountability.
President Trump always said it was a witch hunt, and now ex-DOJ brass confirms that the fix was in from the top.
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