Never Before in American Hory: The FBI Searches a Former President’s Home

The fight between former President Donald Trump and the National Archives that burst into the open when FBI agents searched Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate has no precedent in American presidential hory.
It was also a high-risk gamble Attorney General Merrick Garland that the law enforcement operation at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s sprawling home, will stand up to accusations that the Justice Department is pursuing a political vendetta against President Joe Biden’s opponent in 2020 — and a likely rival in 2024.

Trump’s demonization of the FBI and the Justice Department during his four years in office, designed to undermine the legitimacy of the country’s law enforcement institutions even as they pursued charges against him, has made it even more difficult for Garland to investigate Trump without a backlash from the former president’s supporters.
The decision to order Monday’s search put the Justice Department’s credibility on the line months before congressional elections this fall and as the country remains deeply polarized. For Garland, the pressure to justify the FBI’s actions will be intense. And if the search for classified documents does not end up producing significant evidence of a crime, the event could be relegated hory to serve as another example of a move against Trump that backfired.
Trump faces risks of his own in rushing to criticize Garland and the FBI, as he did during the search Monday, when he called the operation “an assault that could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries.” Trump no longer has the protections provided the presidency, and he would be far more vulnerable if he were found to have mishandled highly classified information that threatens the nation’s national security.

A number of horians said that the search, although extraordinary, seemed appropriate for a president who flagrantly flouted the law, refuses to concede defeat and helped orchestrate an effort to overturn the 2020 election.
“In an atmosphere like this, you have to assume that the attorney general did not do this casually,” said Michael Beschloss, a veteran presidential horian. “And therefore the criminal suspicions — we don’t know yet exactly what they are — they have to be fairly serious.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022. Trump said on Monday, Aug. 8, that the FBI had searched his Palm Beach, Fla., home and had broken open a safe — an account that, if accurate, would be a dramatic escalation in the various investigations into the former president. (Emil Lippe/The New York Times)
In Trump’s case, archivs at the National Archives discovered earlier this year that the former president had taken classified documents from the White House after his defeat, leading federal authorities to begin an investigation. They eventually sought a search warrant from a judge to determine what remained in the former president’s custody.
Key details remain secret, including what the FBI was looking for and why authorities felt the need to conduct a surprise search after months of legal wrangling between the government and lawyers for Trump.
The search happened as angry voices on the far-right fringe of American politics are talking about another civil war, and as more mainstream Republicans are threatening retribution if they take power in Congress in the fall. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the minority leader, warned Garland to preserve documents and clear his calendar.

“This puts our political culture on a kind of emergency alert mode,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential horian at Rice University. “It’s like turning over the apple cart of American politics.”
Critics of Trump said it was no surprise that a president who shattered legal and procedural norms while he was in the Oval Office would now find himself at the center of a classified documents dispute.
For nearly 35 years, the tug of war over presidential records — and who controls them — has been a largely bureaucratic one waged in the halls of the National Archives and debated among lawyers in courtrooms.
Former President Richard M. Nixon spent nearly four years after Watergate fighting for control over millions of pages of presidential records and hundreds of hours of the audiotapes that helped force his resignation. Beschloss said that Nixon initially reached a deal with President Gerald R. Ford that would have given him control over his papers as well as the ability to destroy them. But an act passed Congress after Nixon left office in August 1974 forced him to take his fight to court. He eventually lost in the Supreme Court, 7-2.
The back part of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., June 26, 2020. Trump said on Monday, Aug. 8, that the FBI had searched his Palm Beach, Fla., home and had broken open a safe — an account that, if accurate, would be a dramatic escalation in the various investigations into the former president. (Saul Martinez/The New York Times)
The dispute led to the passage in 1978 of the Presidential Records Act, which for the first time made it clear that White House records are the property of the federal government, not the president who created them. Since then, presidents from both parties have haggled over how and when the archives may release those documents to the public.
Presidents and their aides have also been subjected to other laws concerning the handling of classified information. Over the years, a handful of top federal officials have been charged with illegally handling classified information.
David Petraeus, the Army general who was CIA director under President Barack Obama, admitted in 2015 that he provided his highly classified journals to his lover, pleading guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, a misdemeanor.
Sandy Berger, who was national security adviser for President Bill Clinton, paid a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to removing classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 to prepare for his testimony to the 9/11 Commission.
But there has never been a clash between a former president and the government like the one that culminated in Monday’s search, said Lee White, executive director of the National Coalition for Hory.

White, who has met frequently over the years with officials at the National Archives, said they usually work hard to resolve disagreements about documents with former presidents and their advisers.
“They tend to be deferential to the White House,” White said of the lawyers at the National Archives. “You know, these questions come up about presidential records and they are like, ‘Look, our job is to advise the White House.’ But they are not, nature, an aggressive group of attorneys.”
Beschloss and Brinkley said the search of Trump’s house has the potential to become a flashpoint in the ongoing struggle between those investigating the former president’s actions and the forces who supported Trump’s frantic efforts to stay in office.
But they said there were also risks for Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill, who on Monday rushed to attack Garland and the FBI in the hours after the search.
“You now have Kevin McCarthy — something else we’ve never seen before in hory — making ugly threats to an attorney general, obviously trying to intimidate him,” Beschloss said.
Trump’s defenders did not wait to find out what evidence the FBI found or even sought before using the search to ratchet up long-standing grievances that the former president stoked throughout his time in office. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., quickly dributed a short video on Twitter accusing the Biden adminration of acting like the regime of a dictator in a developing nation.
“This is what happens in places like Nicaragua,” Rubio said in the video. “Where last year every single person that ran against Daniel Ortega for president, every single person that put their name on the ballot, was arrested and is still in jail.
“You can try to diminish it, but that’s exactly what happened tonight,” Rubio said.
The horians said the events are a test of the resilience of American democracy when it is under assault.
“We are in the middle of a neo-civil war in this country,” Brinkley said. “This is a starkly unprecedented moment in U.S. hory.”