FBI returns records from Mar-a-Lago search to Trump, White House says
The White House said on Friday that the FBI had given President Donald Trump boxes stemming from a search of his Florida property for classified documents that were taken after Trump left office during his first term.
It was not immediately clear whether the boxes included classified materials, but Trump celebrated obtaining them in a post on Truth Social on Friday night.
“The Department of Justice has just returned the boxes that Deranged Jack Smith made such a big deal about. They are being brought down to Florida and will someday be part of the Trump Presidential Library,” Trump wrote. “Justice finally won out. I did absolutely nothing wrong. This was merely an attack on a political opponent that, obviously, did not work well. Justice in our Country will now be restored.”
White House staffers were seen Friday loading roughly 15 boxes of documents onto the rear of Air Force One.
White House communications director Steven Cheung said that the FBI was “giving the President his property back that was taken during the unlawful and illegal raids.”
“We are taking possession of the boxes today and loading them onto Air Force One,” Cheung said in a statement.
Responding to reporter questions during flight, counselor to the president Alina Habba said she had personally carried some of the boxes with the staffers “to get them back to where they belong, which is where they were unlawfully taken from, and that is Florida.”
Habba criticized the special counsel who probed Trump’s handling of classified documents and first brought charges in 2023, saying, “Jack Smith is no longer. We are in the Oval Office.”
“Frankly, this was a hoax, as we knew,” Habba added.
Asked what was contained in the boxes, Habba said: “These are President Trump’s things. These are his items, and they needed to be returned to him.”
Habba did not respond directly when asked whether the White House is changing any storage protocol following the FBI’s search of Trump’s Florida property in 2022 and seizure of a trove of classified materials.
She instead referred to pictures, newspaper articles, “things that were completely irrelevant” to the investigation, that “were taken from President Trump, and those are now being returned.”
A federal judge dismissed Trump’s classified documents case last year after she found that Smith’s appointment and funding for the investigation had violated the law. Smith later urged an appeals court to revive the case, which the Justice Department dropped after Trump won the presidential election last year, citing longstanding department policy that opposes prosecuting a sitting president. Smith resigned in January.
Trump had pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing after he was charged in 2023 in the Southern District of Florida with willfully retaining national defense information, making false statements and representations, and conspiring to obstruct justice.
In a superseding indictment that year, Trump was also accused of scheming with co-defendants to delete security video at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
The Justice Department last month also dropped its case against Trump’s co-defendants, Trump aide Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who had pleaded not guilty in the case, effectively terminating the prosecution.
