{"id":1608082,"date":"2022-08-16T08:47:04","date_gmt":"2022-08-16T12:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1608082"},"modified":"2022-08-16T09:03:37","modified_gmt":"2022-08-16T13:03:37","slug":"fbi-returns-trumps-passports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/fbi-returns-trumps-passports\/","title":{"rendered":"FBI Returns Trump&#8217;s Passports"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">8<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Ffbi-returns-trumps-passports%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1608082&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/politics\/donald-trump\/trumps-passports-returned-mar-lago-search-doj-official-says-rcna43192?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A curious development indeed<\/a>, especially after <a href=\"https:\/\/hotair.com\/allahpundit\/2022\/08\/15\/why-did-the-fbi-seize-trumps-passports-n489891\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">yesterday\u2019s\u00a0<em>pas de deux<\/em><\/a> over whether the FBI took Donald Trump\u2019s passports \u2014 and why. Trump claimed that FBI agents \u201cstole my three Passports,\u201d while the Department of Justice remained silent about it until late in the day.<\/p>\n<p>Now there are two questions to ask after this NBC News report: why did FBI agents take them in the first place, and why did the inventory from the seizure not list them?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Passports belonging to Donald Trump have been returned to the former president after last week\u2019s FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home, a Justice Department official told NBC News on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>The FBI acknowledged it had had the passports the same day Trump said on his social media platform that FBI agents who conducted the search on Aug. 8 took them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That\u2019s not exactly a sterling level of accountability. It took Trump a week to notice that the passports were missing, or at least a week to go public with it. His social-media post announcing the \u201ctheft\u201d appeared yesterday at 12:22 ET; the raid took place on the morning of Monday, August 8. The FBI left with a dozen or so boxes of material, which sounds like a lot but is actually rather paltry in legal cases, as Andrew McCarthy noted in an earlier column at National Review. If this search was as acutely necessary as the DoJ claims, shouldn\u2019t the FBI have realized they had his passports almost immediately \u2014 and returned them days ago?<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s a third question. Let\u2019s stick with the first two. Why would the FBI have taken Trump\u2019s passports as part of a search purportedly aimed at retrieving classified material? Passports don\u2019t have anything to do with Trump\u2019s retention of allegedly classified material, nor would they have any material connection to the DoJ\u2019s investigation into January 6, which this search warrant appears to facilitate <em>sotto voce<\/em>. Law enforcement can\u2019t just take a person\u2019s passport without a judicial order restricting a person\u2019s travel. Trump hasn\u2019t even been charged with any crime, let alone be made subject to such a bail condition. He has every right to travel outside the US, and every right to retain his passports.<\/p>\n<p>The FBI suggested that the removal of the passports was an accident:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIn executing search warrants, the FBI follows search and seizure procedures ordered by courts, then returns items that do not need to be retained for law enforcement purposes,\u201d the spokesperson said in a statement Monday evening that did not mention the passports.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This seems like an odd explanation. Trump almost certainly did not store his passports with the government documents that the search warrant targeted. Those are items usually stored in a secured\u00a0<em>personal<\/em> space, like a safe or perhaps a locked desk drawer (or maybe a dresser drawer?). It\u2019s not the kind of item that would have been easily swept up by accident even in a broad search, in other words. It\u2019s <em>possible<\/em>, but appears unlikely unless this was one of the clumsiest search-and-retrieval operations conducted by the FBI.<\/p>\n<p>That brings us to the second question: Why weren\u2019t the passports listed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/politics\/donald-trump\/read-fbis-search-warrant-documents-trumps-mar-lago-resort-rcna42923\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">on the inventory<\/a>? FBI agents certainly know what passports look like. The inventory is a legal record of everything the FBI took out of Trump\u2019s home in executing the search. There may be some understandable fuzziness on the identity of each and every single sheet of paper in those boxes, but passports are unique and instantly recognizable \u2014 and look nothing like the documents in question. The inventory was specific enough on August 8 to include separate entries for \u201chandwritten note,\u201d \u201cExecutive Grant of Clemency re: Roger Jason Stone Jr,\u201d and two entries logging \u201cbinder of photos.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But no one noticed three passports?\u00a0Again, this either indicates that the FBI conducted this raid in an incredibly sloppy manner, or something else is afoot.<\/p>\n<p>All of this raises a <em>fourth<\/em> question, too: What <em>else<\/em> did the FBI take that didn\u2019t get inventoried and might not be germane to any legit investigation? And a fifth: Will they return anything else improperly taken and left off the inventory on their own volition \u2014 or will Trump have to make a public stink to force them to return those, too?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A curious development indeed, especially after yesterday\u2019s\u00a0pas de deux over whether the FBI took Donald Trump\u2019s passports \u2014 and why. Trump claimed that FBI agents \u201cstole my three Passports,\u201d while<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1608082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}