A newly unearthed Biden Justice Department email is adding fresh fuel to the long-running firestorm over the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid.
Patty Stemler, a veteran DOJ official reportedly tapped by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to consult on Trump-related matters, raised internal legal concerns just two days after the FBI searched President Donald Trump’s Florida home on Aug. 8, 2022, according to Just the News.
“I didn’t know about this search in advance, but I have been worrying about it ever since and worrying more now,” Stemler wrote in an Aug. 10, 2022 email to Sophia Brill, then an attorney in DOJ’s National Security Division.
Then came the key question.
“Doesn’t Trump maintain that he had the authority to declassify documents while he was still President?”
“Has anyone in NSD or OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] looked at that? I know we have procedures for declassifying, but is the President as Commander in Chief bound by those procedures? We also have procedures for granting pardons, but the President doesn’t have to follow them,” she added.
That is not some MAGA pundit talking.
That is a senior DOJ veteran asking whether the government had fully reckoned with Trump’s central defense before the most politically explosive FBI search in modern history.
Garland later said he “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant” in the Mar-a-Lago matter, while insisting the department does “not take such a decision lightly.”
The new email lands as Republicans continue probing what they call the weaponization of federal law enforcement against Trump.
It also follows prior reporting that some FBI officials had concerns over whether probable cause had been established before the search, even as the warrant ultimately moved forward.
Trump’s office said in August 2022 that documents taken from the Oval Office to the White House residence were covered by a “standing order” deeming them declassified.
Critics disputed that claim, and courts never fully resolved the core political fight after the classified-documents case collapsed following Trump’s return to power.
But Stemler’s email shows the concern existed inside Biden’s own DOJ almost immediately.
More over at Just The News:
Exclusive: Key Biden DOJ official raised ‘concerns’ about FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, memo shows https://t.co/r6o7Np2dwz
— Just the News (@JustTheNews) May 26, 2026
