DOJ Investigators Seek Interviews With FBI Officials Over 2022 Mar-a-Lago Search

The Justice Department has asked to interview FBI officials who took part in the August 2022 search of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, according to four sources cited by Reuters and confirmed separately by the Associated Press. The requests went out this past week as voluntary interviews, not subpoenas.

The outreach comes from investigators working under Joe diGenova, a Trump ally who took over the Florida-based inquiry earlier this year. That inquiry has been built around one core claim: that Trump was the target of a criminal conspiracy meant to violate his rights.

Until now, the probe had mostly stayed focused on the 2017 U.S. intelligence assessment concluding Russia tried to help Trump win the 2016 election. Investigators have spent recent months interviewing current and former intelligence officials on that front, according to Reuters. The new interview requests tied to the Mar-a-Lago search mark an expansion into a second, separate chapter of Trump's legal history.

Several former career FBI officials who worked the classified documents search have been approached, according to two of the four sources who spoke to Reuters. Two other sources confirmed the outreach independently. All four spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The Justice Department and FBI did not respond to requests for comment from either wire service.

What the original search found, and what came of it

The 2022 search turned up more than 100 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, including highly sensitive national security records, according to Reuters. That discovery led to criminal charges against Trump and two associates for illegally retaining classified material and obstructing government efforts to get it back.

Trump's legal team, led by now-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, argued at the time that the search warrant itself was unlawful and tried to get the resulting evidence thrown out. Prosecutors countered that they had ample justification, including evidence that Trump had already stalled earlier attempts to recover the documents.

The case never reached trial. A federal judge dismissed it after ruling that special counsel Jack Smith had been unlawfully appointed to the role. The Justice Department dropped its appeal of that ruling once Trump won the 2024 election.

The other side of the story, from Trump's camp

Trump has argued for years that the raid was a setup. In a Truth Social statement after the search, he said the DOJ and FBI had asked his legal team in June 2022 to add an extra lock to the Mar-a-Lago storage room where the boxes were kept. His team complied and showed agents the secured area and the boxes themselves, according to Breitbart's reporting on his statement at the time. Trump said agents then broke that same lock during the August raid without warning.

Kash Patel, who now runs the FBI under Trump, told Breitbart News in a separate interview that claims about classified material at Mar-a-Lago were "misleading" because the documents had already been declassified by Trump as president, even though the classification markings had not been updated. That claim about blanket declassification was disputed by prosecutors during the criminal case and was never resolved by a court, since the case was dismissed on the separate question of Smith's appointment.

Donald Trump Jr. called the raid politically motivated targeting of his father by the Biden administration's Justice Department at the time. Those characterizations remain the Trump family's position. They are not findings from any court or investigation.

Status of the current investigation

No charges have been filed as a result of the current diGenova-led probe. No target has been named publicly. The Justice Department has not confirmed what specific conduct or which officials are under scrutiny beyond the interview requests themselves.

Reuters noted that investigating the Florida search could give the department "a legal hook" for a future case, following the collapse of the original documents prosecution. That's a characterization of possible strategy, not a confirmed charging decision.

The current Justice Department, under Trump's second term, has already investigated or prosecuted several of Trump's past critics and people who led investigations into him, a pattern Reuters flagged directly in its reporting. Whether that pattern reflects legitimate follow-through on genuine misconduct or a targeted use of federal power against Trump's opponents is exactly what remains contested and unproven either way.

The open question now is straightforward: will the voluntary interviews with these former FBI officials lead to subpoenas, a grand jury, or actual charges, or will this be another investigation that generates headlines without an indictment. Neither DOJ nor the FBI has said.