Phill Kline, former Kansas Attorney General and current law professor at Liberty University School of Law, said the newly declassified emails showing FBI doubts about probable cause for the 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid fits a broader pattern of DOJ weaponization against President Donald Trump.
Newly declassified emails reveal that despite FBI officials raising serious doubts about whether probable cause existed to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Biden-era DOJ leaders pushed forward with an expanded, high-profile raid, dismissed concerns about optics, and refused cooperation with Trump’s attorneys.
The disclosures, revealed this week, suggest DOJ leadership overrode internal FBI objections, raising the possibility of civil liberties violations and potential legal recourse for Trump.
On Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Kline said it was evident early in the Biden administration that DOJ leadership intended to publicly compromise Trump’s future election prospects by creating a media narrative of criminality, even if that required departing from standard procedures.
“It was pretty clear early on what the aim of the Justice Department was, and that was to compromise President Trump in his reelection bid. They were going to go after – in a public way – any type of action, conduct that would generate newspaper articles and criticism of the president and a belief of a possible criminal act,” Kline explained.
He went on to explain how probable cause was never necessary for the DOJ’s actions because the department merely needed a “hook.”
“They didn’t need probable cause. They didn’t need anything. They just needed some type of hook, and the hook that they found at that time was well, you’ve got classified documents,” he said.
Kline argued that Trump’s possession of classified documents was known precisely because Trump was cooperating with authorities about which documents he could retain and which he would return.
This cooperation, Kline said, made it extremely difficult to prove criminal intent, a point he notes aligns with what FBI officials reportedly expressed in the newly declassified emails. Nonetheless, he stressed how then-Attorney General Merrick Garland disregarded such concerns and proceeded anyway.
Kline sharply criticized Garland, asserting that he weaponized the DOJ to an unprecedented degree.
“Merrick Garland weaponized the Department of Justice as no Attorney General previously in the United States history has done,” Kline said.
“It truly is offensive to American ideals what the Garland Department of Justice did and what the left did to try to defeat Trump,” he added.
Beyond the Trump investigation itself, Kline situated the Mar-a-Lago raid within a broader pattern of criminalizing political dissent, arguing that the DOJ coordinated with outside groups to support censorship efforts and intimidate political opponents.
Looking forward, Kline warned against retaliatory prosecutions that would perpetuate the cycle of lawfare and instead proposed a strategy focused on truth-finding and revealing the extent to which the Biden administration treated American citizens as political enemies.
“I think we need to get at the truth, but we have to be bigger than the left and stop this trend of the weaponization of the Department of Justice, because that’s a destroyer free society,” he stressed.
“Drilling down and revealing to the American people the extent that their government viewed them as the enemy needs to be the goal before the next election, because we’ve never seen anything like this,” he added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
