WASHINGTON — The Biden White House was “coordinating” with the Department of Justice about an FBI search for classified documents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence before taking their conversation “offline,” according to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s former chief of staff Chad Mizelle.
Mizelle told The Post in an exclusive interview Wednesday that he reviewed smoking-gun emails between officials in former President Joe Biden’s White House Counsel’s Office, Merrick Garland’s DOJ and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in the months before the execution of a search warrant at the Palm Beach, Fla., resort on Aug. 8, 2022.
“We have concrete evidence that Biden’s White House was very much involved in the most unprecedented, unjust and improper law enforcement act, really in the history of our country, which is to use the FBI to raid the home of a political rival and former president of the United States,” Mizelle said.
“They were talking about it. They’re talking about documents. They were looping in NARA, essentially the archives, who is the custodian for these documents, and continuing to talk about it until at one point, somebody says — I think it was the White House person, ‘Hey, why don’t we take this offline,’” he recalled.
“And then all of a sudden every email communication on this thing stops,” he added. “It made it very clear that the White House was involved. The White House knew about it. The White House not only knew about it, they were coordinating it. They were putting DOJ in touch with NARA specifically regarding these documents in Mar-a-Lago.”
A source familiar with the emails confirmed to the Post that the conversations Mizelle referenced exist. The Post has not independently reviewed the documents.
Internal FBI and DOJ communications released Tuesday by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) highlight how the bureau in the weeks before the raid did not believe agents had probable cause to execute the search warrant — but DOJ officials and former special counsel Jack Smith’s team overrode them in the dispute.
Washington Field Office Assistant Director in Charge Steven D’Antuono was among several FBI officials opposed to the search warrant — while Smith’s deputy Jay Bratt was in favor of executing it, with Garland giving the final approval.
The FBI ultimately recovered 102 classified documents leading to a June 2023 indictment, but Smith’s case was dismissed the next year in July after a judge ruled he had been improperly appointed special counsel without a vote from Congress.
The emails as described by Mizelle also clash with DOJ’s purported independence from the commander-in-chief as well as a memo put out by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, limiting officials’ interactions with the White House.
“[T]he Justice Department will not advise the White House concerning pending or contemplated criminal or civil law enforcement investigations or cases unless doing so is important for the performance of the President’s duties and appropriate from a law enforcement perspective,” the July 21, 2021, memo stated.
Biden White House aides insisted that the president was not aware of the FBI’s planned search beforehand — with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declining to comment 18 times on the unprecedented action the day after the raid.
“If they have a memo that they’re violating, that’s a problem,” Mizelle, who left the DOJ in September, said when asked about the memo. “If they tell the American people they’re not involved and they were in fact involved, that’s a problem.”
Trump’s defense team last year demanded evidence of the purported coordination as part of Smith’s federal criminal case charging the former president with dozens of counts for allegedly holding onto sensitive national security files after leaving office.
The evidence, the defense lawyers argued, revealed “close participation in the investigation by NARA and Biden Administration components such as the White House Counsel’s Office, as well as senior officials at DOJ and FBI.”
“These revelations are disturbing but not surprising,” wrote attorneys Todd Blanche, now Trump’s deputy attorney general in the DOJ, and Christopher Kise in the Jan. 16, 2024, filing, which referenced documents from 2021 and 2022.
Then-Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall acknowledged in a May 10, 2022, letter that she was seeking to retrieve the classified documents from Trump’s Florida estate, in part, based on communications with “Counsel to the President,” which Trump’s defense team argued was “further evidence that NARA must be considered part of the prosecution team.”
That was one day before a federal grand jury issued a subpoena for the documents that prompted Trump’s attorneys to hand over an initial batch of documents at Mar-a-Lago to the DOJ and FBI on June 3, 2022.
Blanche and Kise asked in their court filings for “all correspondence about the search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022” — but Smith’s team in a response months later argued some internal communications within the DOJ were “privileged from disclosure.”
Smith’s team also claimed that the White House Counsel’s Office — primarily through deputy counsel Jonathan Su — only had “formal and limited” involvement, discussing the missing records with NARA and the White House Office of Records Management in 2021 before the DOJ was officially involved.
NARA referred the matter of the missing documents to the Justice Department in February 2022, and Garland authorized a criminal investigation the following month.
Mizelle said the emails he reviewed “completely undermine” the claim “that the White House was not in any way involved in the decision to raid the president’s house.”
“What is offensive to me here is the hypocrisy of saying under no circumstances was the White House involved when they were in fact involved, and now we have email records to prove it,” he fumed. “They coordinated what became a raid on the former president’s home and then lied about it.”
“And then they, they had the sense to say, ‘Hey, we probably shouldn’t be creating a paper trail here, that the next administration is gonna be able to see,’” he added. “They’re not gonna say expressly in an email, ‘Please raid Donald Trump’s house, you know, period. … No one is so foolish as to put that into a correspondence.’”
“It’s exactly why they decided to, quote, ‘take this offline,’ but the strong tenor of everything, read in the context of how the White House communicates with the agencies, it was, ‘DOJ, you better do something about this,’” he also said.
Mizelle noted that he didn’t observe other correspondence regarding the criminal prosecutions brought against Trump for alleged 2020 election interference in Washington, DC, or Atlanta, Ga., or for “hush money” payments before the 2016 election in Manhattan.
The former DOJ official said the Trump administration is still trying “to get to the bottom of what actually happened with the raid.”
The DOJ declined to comment. A Biden spokesperson and Su did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
