They told us the raid was airtight. They told us the law was clear.

Now a newly surfaced email suggests that even inside the Biden Department of Justice, serious legal doubts were being raised just days after FBI agents descended on President Trump’s Florida home.

A report from Just the News reveals that Patty Stemler, a decades-long DOJ veteran and a key ally of Attorney General Merrick Garland, sent an internal email two days after the Aug. 8, 2022 raid expressing concern about the legal basis for the search.

Just the News reported that a top Biden Justice Department official and key ally of then-Attorney General Merrick Garland raised legal “concerns” about the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, warning that then-former President Donald Trump may have actually declassified the records seized by agents.

The outlet identified the official as Patty Stemler, a decades-long DOJ veteran who was reportedly picked by Garland in 2022 to help consult on Trump-related cases. According to the report, Stemler sent the email two days after the bureau’s Aug. 8, 2022 raid of Trump’s Florida resort home, where she said she had “a few concerns.”

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Stemler sent the email to Sophia Brill, who later became a Biden White House lawyer and was then an attorney inside DOJ’s National Security Division. That division played a central role in the Trump documents inquiry, according to the report.

“I didn’t know about this search in advance, but I have been worrying about it ever since and worrying more now,” Stemler wrote, according to Just the News. She then asked whether Trump maintained that he had the authority to declassify documents while he was still president.

John Solomon, one of the reporters on the Just the News exclusive, flagged the memo report on X:

Stemler was reportedly hand-picked in 2022 to consult on Trump-related cases, making her one of the most senior officials in the loop on these matters.

Yet according to the email, she wrote that she did not know about the search in advance, had been worrying about it since it happened, and was worrying even more afterward.

That is not the language of a department that was confident in its own legal footing.

She reportedly compared presidential declassification procedures to the pardon power, noting that presidents do not have to follow ordinary pardon procedures when exercising that authority.

In other words, a senior Garland ally was raising the very same argument that Trump and his legal team had been making publicly, and she was asking whether anyone in the building had bothered to examine it before sending armed agents through the front door of Mar-a-Lago.

Let that sink in.

Garland himself went on camera and told the country that he had personally approved the decision to seek the search warrant.

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He stood behind that decision. The media cheered.

Behind the scenes, his own trusted adviser was firing off emails asking whether the legal theory behind the entire operation had actually been vetted.

The FBI seized boxes of records from Trump’s estate that day. The images of agents swarming a former president’s home were broadcast around the world.

It was treated as proof of guilt before a single charge was even filed.

Now we learn that the Biden DOJ’s own people were not even sure the raid was on solid legal ground.

Stemler raised these concerns within 48 hours, not years later after the politics had shifted.

She was not some low-level staffer looking for attention. She was a veteran official who had been specifically brought in to advise on Trump-related legal matters.

As The Gateway Pundit noted, the email amounts to a top Biden DOJ official warning her own colleagues that the raid was legally problematic.

The Gateway Pundit noted that Merrick Garland’s top adviser fired off a warning to administration lawyers after Biden’s FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022.

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The outlet identified Stemler as a longtime DOJ official chosen by Garland to consult on lawfare cases against Trump and reported that she warned about legal issues arising from the raid.

It also pointed back to the political shock of the raid itself: Biden’s FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and seized boxes of records from Trump’s Florida estate after the National Archives visited earlier that year and demanded documents.

The Gateway Pundit highlighted the same email language reported by Just the News, including Stemler’s question about whether President Trump maintained that he had authority to declassify documents while still president, and whether DOJ’s National Security Division or Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed that question.

Every American who watched that raid unfold on television deserves to know the full story of what was happening inside the department that ordered it.

The more we learn, the worse it looks for the people who weaponized federal law enforcement against a former president and political opponent.

 

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