Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys alleged in filings docketed Tuesday that prosecutors in the classified documents case violated his constitutional rights on several occasions.

Trump’s attorneys filed multiple motions to dismiss his classified documents case, including one for “prosecutorial misconduct and due process violations” and another based on the “unconstitutional” Mar-a-Lago raid. In their filing on the raid, Trump’s attorneys argued the warrant, which they said was “executed in an egregious fashion and in bad faith,” lacked “the particularity required by the Fourth Amendment.”

The warrant did not establish a basis for “rummaging through the majority” of the rooms at Mar-a-Lago, including “the private bedrooms of the First Lady and President Trump’s youngest son,” Trump’s attorneys wrote. They asked that evidence gathered from the raid, along with through a “subsequent unlawful violation of President Trump’s attorney-client privilege,” be suppressed.

“What was unthinkable with respect to President Clinton’s recordings, and deemed unwarranted with respect to Hillary Clinton’s destruction of evidence, was determined to be appropriate by the Biden Administration for President Biden’s chief political rival,” his attorneys wrote. “Personally authorized by Attorney General Garland, and supported over FBI objections by DOJ leadership who did not ‘give a damn about the optics’ of these unprecedented steps, the raid of Mar-a-Lago was unconstitutional.”

In the other motion to dismiss, Trump’s attorneys argued that “NARA, the Biden Administration, and DOJ ‘collude[d] in bad faith’ to deprive President Trump of his constitutional rights by using civil authorities to collect evidence for use in a criminal prosecution.”

“Politically biased NARA officials violated the agency’s regulations, and broke custom and practice dating back to the enactment of the [Presidential Records Act], by colluding with the Biden Administration to initiate a criminal investigation of President Trump rather than simply collecting the records that President Trump had designated as Presidential Record,” they wrote.

“As a result of this misconduct, under the guise of NARA’s civil and administrative authorities, the prosecution team collected evidence—including the 15 Boxes and statements by President Trump’s PRA representatives—that they used to further the criminal investigation in an unfairly prejudicial and unlawful fashion,” Trump’s attorneys continued.

The government wrote in response to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago filing that it “adopted a measured, graduated approach” since the start of the case. Prosecutors also argued that Trump’s “bad-faith collusion” narrative is “baseless.”

“His claims would fail even if his conspiracy theory were taken at face value,” they wrote. “That is, even if NARA’s General Counsel had ‘informally reached out’ to a criminal prosecutor, Trump’s request for suppression or dismissal would fail because he does not come close to alleging the sort of bad-faith collusion that could give rise to a due process violation.”

KATELYNN RICHARDSON
May 21, 20243:18 PM ET

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