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A legal expert has hit out at the "ludicrous" suggestion that Donald Trump is considering allowing the FBI to search his Mar-a-Lago resort once more to convince prosecutors that the former president has returned all sensitive materials kept at the Florida resort.
Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University, was reacting to a report from CNN that Trump's legal team is weighing up allowing federal agents back into Mar-a-Lago to conduct a potentially supervised search.
The argument is that the FBI and the Department of Justice will then see that Trump has surrendered all documents that were removed from the White House when he left office in January 2021, after several attempts to retrieve them.
"What a ludicrous offer," Tribe tweeted. "Who imagines Trump hasn't already stashed missing stuff at his other properties?"
Trump is being investigated over allegations he mishandled sensitive materials after he left office, then attempted to obstruct federal attempts to retrieve them.
In February, the National Archives confirmed it had found 15 boxes containing classified material in Trump's Florida home, before the FBI returned in June to retrieve more.
During the June FBI visit, Trump's legal team is alleged to have "explicitly prohibited" federal agents from looking inside a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, with attorney Christina Bobb said to have signed off a statement, drafted by another Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, that said all the documents had been returned.
According to CNN, citing an unnamed source, Bobb requested that a line was added to the attestation which stated that the claim about all the materials being returned was "based upon the information that has been provided" to her.
In August, the FBI carried out a raid of Mar-a-Lago, recovering around 11,000 White House documents, including more than 100 marked classified.
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, making the disputed claim that he declassified all the documents while he was still president before they were moved to Mar-a-Lago.
Sources close to the former president are quoted by CNN as saying that those around Trump consider the federal investigation "much ado about nothing" and that he wants to "move on."
Speaking to CNN's Anderson Cooper, lawyer George Conway, husband of former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, described Trump as a "desperate man" as he tries to fight off a number of investigations, dispositions and inquiries into him.
"He will run for president for protection against these legal proceedings, but there's just going to be too many," Conway said.
"He might get the nomination anyway, but I think we're going to see the meltdown to end all meltdowns of a public figure."
Trump has been contacted for comment.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more