A senior Justice Department official — a career attorney with decades inside the institution — sent a quiet, anxious email two days after the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago.
She hadn’t known the raid was coming. And she wasn’t sure it should have happened the way it did.
The email, recently surfaced by Just the News as part of a broader inquiry into the weaponization of federal law enforcement, was written by Patty Stemler, a longtime DOJ veteran whom Attorney General Merrick Garland had tapped in 2022 to help consult on Trump-related cases.
She sent it to Sophia Brill, then an attorney inside DOJ’s National Security Division — later a Biden White House lawyer — on August 10th, two days after agents descended on the former president’s Florida home.
“I didn’t know about this search in advance,” Stemler wrote, “but I have been worrying about it ever since and worrying more now.”
What worried her was a question the department apparently hadn’t resolved before agents walked through the door: Had Trump, while still president, already declassified the very documents seized in the raid?
“Doesn’t Trump maintain that he had the authority to declassify documents while he was still President?” she asked Brill. “Has anyone in NSD or OLC looked at that? I know we have procedures for declassifying, but is the President as Commander in Chief bound by those procedures? We also have procedures for granting pardons, but the President doesn’t have to follow them.”
It is a serious constitutional question — the kind one might expect to be answered before, not after, an unprecedented search of a former president’s home.
Attorney General Garland has said he personally approved the decision to seek the warrant. What remains unclear is whether anyone in his orbit had fully grappled with the legal exposure that Stemler, an insider, spotted almost immediately.
She raised a second concern as well — one with direct implications for any potential prosecution.
“If we disclose that we found X classified documents before we seek an indictment,” she wrote, “will that trench on any fair trial rights or violate the ethical obligations of a prosecutor?”
This is not, it turns out, the first internal dissent to surface.
FBI Director Kash Patel has provided Congress with evidence that agents themselves did not believe they had met the legal standard of probable cause required to execute the search, but proceeded anyway.
Trump’s office had offered its own explanation even at the time.
In mid-August 2022, it told Just the News that the materials seized had been declassified under a standing order Trump maintained as president — allowing him to bring sensitive documents to the White House residence to continue working.
“The very fact that these documents were present at Mar-a-Lago means they couldn’t have been classified,” the office stated. “President Trump, in order to prepare for work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents, from the Oval Office to the residence.”
The office added: “He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified. The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the President of the United States.”
Stemler, it appears, was worried about precisely that argument — and wondering, in real time, whether anyone had thought it through.
Full report over at Just The News:
Exclusive: Key Biden DOJ official raised ‘concerns’ about FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, memo shows https://t.co/r6o7Np2dwz
— Just the News (@JustTheNews) May 26, 2026
