DoJ moves for Trump Mar-a-Lago search warrant to be unsealed – as it happened

Attorney general Merrick Garland made the unusual step of appearing in Washington to take responsibility for the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, and saying the department would ask a judge to unseal the warrant and property receipt from the search. Now, the ball is in Trump’s court to object to the documents’ release – should he so choose.

Here’s what else happened today:

• A gunman opened fire at the FBI’s office in Cincinnati as the agency faces increased threats following its search of Mar-a-Lago.

• More good economic data bolstered the case that inflation was set to meaningfully decline in the months to come, which the White House looked to capitalize on.

• Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer asked voters to elect more Democrats and give them the chance to pass bills further improving social services.

• A poll showed Liz Cheney deep underwater with Wyoming Republicans in the upcoming primary, bolstering the case that she will be booted from Congress due to her opposition to Trump.

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, weighed in on the justice department’s announcement that it will move to release the warrant from the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.

“The primary reason the attorney general and FBI are being pushed to disclose why the search was necessary is because of the deep mistrust of the FBI and DOJ when it comes to all things Trump”, Graham said, referring to other investigations involving the former president, such as Robert Mueller’s probe into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

“What I am looking for is the predicate for the search. Was the information provided to the judge sufficient and necessary to authorize a raid on the former president’s home within ninety days of the midterm election? I am urging, actually insisting, the DOJ and the FBI lay their cards on the table as to why this course of action was necessary. Until that is done the suspicion will continue to mount,” the senator said.

“Half the country believes that when it comes to President Trump there are no rules. They have lost faith in the system. The only way to address that problem is full disclosure of the facts and circumstances which led to this unprecedented action.”

The justice department’s motion to unseal the warrant and property receipt from the Mar-a-Lago search have been posted publicly, and offers details of the legal reasoning behind the request.

The motion recounts that the search was carried out quietly with little public attention, until “later that same day, former President Trump issued a public statement acknowledging the execution of the warrant. In the days since, the search warrant and related materials have been the subject of significant interest and attention from news media organizations and other entities.”

“The public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred under these circumstances weighs heavily in favor of unsealing”, said the motion, which was signed by Juan Antonio Gonzalez, the US attorney for the southern district of Florida, and Jay I. Bratt, chief of the justice department’s counterintelligence and export control section.

It asks for the documents to be released “given the intense public interest presented by a search of a residence of a former president… absent objection from the former president.”

Merrick Garland has finished his speech, and declined to take questions from the press.

The meat of his address was that the justice department will ask a judge to release the warrant allowing the FBI to search “a premises located in Florida” as Garland put it, which we all know is Mar-a-Lago. It will also ask for the release of the property receipt from the search. Garland said copies of both were left with a lawyer for the ex-president after agents came to the house.

Garland noted that he personally approved the search and “the department does not take such a decision lightly”. He also condemned attacks on the FBI and federal law enforcement, saying “I will not stand by silently when their integrity is unfairly attacked”. Garland declined to comment further, saying, “More information will be made available in the appropriate way and have the appropriate time.”

Attorney general Merrick Garland said the justice department will ask a court to unseal the search warrant allowing it to search Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this week.

“The department filed the motion to make public the warrant and receipt in light of the former president’s public confirmation of the search, the surrounding circumstances, and the substantial public interest in this matter,” Garland said in a press conference at justice department headquarters.

In his speech, attorney general Merrick Garland will address the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this week, CNN confirms:

The White House was given no advance notice of Garland’s speech, NBC News reports:

Attorney general Merrick Garland will soon make a public statement, days after the FBI searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. According to reports, agents were acting on a tip that Trump had classified documents at the site.

Speaking of foes of Donald Trump, John Bolton, who served as his national security adviser before falling out with the then-president, said that his Secret Service detail was recalled after he left the White House.

“It’s normal for Donald Trump”, is how he described the situation to NBC News:

Bolton’s comments came after the justice department yesterday charged a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards with plotting to kill him.

Liz Cheney’s days in Congress are numbered.

That’s the conclusion reached by a University of Wyoming survey that finds Cheney, the state’s congresswoman who is vice-chairing the January 6 committee and has become an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump, almost 30 percentage points behind her challenger Harriet Hageman in next week’s primary.

Republicans dominate the rural state and thus the primary is almost certain to decide who will win Wyoming’s lone seat in the House of Representatives. Cheney is politically conservative, but so is Hageman, who has embraced Trump’s conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election.

News just in: attorney general Merrick Garland will make a statement at 2.30pm ET. No details on the subject matter yet. But certainly the FBI raid will be on journalists’ minds.

The New York Times has an interesting read, revealing the existence of a subpoena for Donald Trump, issued before the Mar-a-Lago raid by the FBI.

The Times reports:

Former President Donald J. Trump received a subpoena this spring in search of documents that federal investigators believed he had failed to turn over earlier in the year, when he returned boxes of material he had improperly taken with him upon moving out of the White House, three people familiar with the matter said.

The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home on Monday by F.B.I. agents seeking classified material they believed might still be there, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to ensure that it had been returned.

The subpoena suggests that the Justice Department tried methods short of a search warrant to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of sending F.B.I. agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and members-only club.

But the most interesting snippet might be lower down the piece. It concerns the nature of the documents Trump possessed and why the FBI needed to take such firm action. The paper says:

Two people briefed on the classified documents that investigators believe remained at Mar-a-Lago indicated that they were so sensitive in nature, and related to national security, that the Justice Department had to act.

Interesting – more is surely yet to be revealed on this story.

Some Republicans hesitant over backing Trump vs FBI

Since the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Florida home looking for missing, sensitive documents from his time in the White House, the cacophony of support and condemnation from Republicans has felt unanimous.

But not entirely.

In a sign that blindly pleasing and following Trump is not seen as an automatic vote-winner in some marginal races, a handful of Republicans have been more reticent in their reactions, according to Politico.

The top of the piece lists a few.

While several Senate GOP nominees jumped to blast the FBI and federal justice officials, Republican candidates in the swing states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina held off. The next morning, as pressure mounted from vocal right-wing activists, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who is running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, took to Twitter with a message that did not mention Trump by name but merely lamented the country’s divisions and asserted that Americans had “every right” to demand answers about the search and seizure of documents.

Rep. Ted Budd, who is seeking a Senate seat in North Carolina, likewise eventually tweeted from his official Congress account after his office was bombarded with calls asking about his response. His statement said Americans deserved a “full explanation” of what happened.

Those calls for transparency from Oz and Budd differ markedly from the more fiery rebukes from other Republicans who painted America as a lawless banana republic — and reflect that some GOP candidates in battleground states are erring on the side of caution in discussing a Trump investigation that could influence critical independent and suburban voters.

Read the rest of the story here.

The Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t just fight climate change and address health care costs. It also would give the IRS tax authority more resources, after years in which the agency complained of being so underfunded it could barely do its job.

Republicans have used the infusion of funds to warn voters that the bill’s Democratic sponsors want to increase audits of the middle class. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has responded to those attacks by sending a letter to commissioner Charles P. Rettig in which she says the agency should not use the money to increase audits for Americans making less than $400,000 a year.

“I direct that any additional resources — including any new personnel or auditors that are hired — shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen wrote.

“This means that, contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.”

It’s been a quiet one in Washington, but that doesn’t mean the chess pieces aren’t moving. Democrats are gearing up for the House of Representatives to meet tomorrow and pass a major plan to fight climate change and lower health care costs, while Republicans are looking ahead to November, when voters seem poised to return them to control of at least one chamber of Congress.

Here’s a rundown of what has happened in the day so far:

• A gunman has attacked a FBI office in Ohio, and reportedly engaged in a shootout with police. The Guardian will update this blog when more details of the incident become available.

• The White House seized on yet another sign of inflation declining to make the case that better days are ahead for the economy.

• A Republican lawmaker who will likely become the party’s top investigator if it takes control of the House told Politico to expect investigations of Covid-19’s origins and Hunter Biden.

• The top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer told voters that if they give him more senators, he’ll pass more bills to lower costs for child and elder care, which the party failed to agree on in the current Congress.

An armed person who opened fire with a nail gun at a FBI office in Cincinnati has been chased into a field and is exchanging fire with police, according to federal investigators and media reports.

The agency has faced a number of threats since its search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this week, prompting director Christopher Wray to declare, “Violence against law enforcement is not the answer, no matter who you’re upset with,” according to the Associated Press.

The FBI confirms the attack began this morning at their office in the city in southern Ohio:

NBC News reports the assailant fired a nail gun at people in the office, and appeared to have an assault rifle:

According to Fox News, police pursued the person to a field outside the city and engaged in a gun battle:

Another trend in the economy is unionization drives in industries and businesses not accustomed to it – such as Starbucks. As Michael Sainato reports, workers at the coffee chain have staged dozens of strikes as the company tries to frustrate their efforts to organize:

Workers at Starbucks have held over 55 different strikes in at least 17 states in the US in recent months over the company’s aggressive opposition to a wave of unionization.

According to an estimate by Starbucks Workers United, the strikes have cost Starbucks over $375,000 in lost revenue. The union created a $1m strike fund in June 2022 to support Starbucks workers through their strikes and several relief funds have been established for strikes and to support workers who have lost their jobs.

Starbucks employees have alleged over 75 workers have been fired in retaliation for union organizing this year, and hundreds of allegations of misconduct by Starbucks related to the union campaign are currently under review at the National Labor Relations Board, including claims of shutting down stores to bust unions, firing workers and intimidating and threatening workers from unionizing. Starbucks has denied all allegations.

The White House is trying to keep the good economic vibes going, a day after data showed inflation potentially beginning to decline across the United States.

The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Cecilia Rouse has released a statement on “encouraging economic news”, pointing to the inflation numbers, the decline in gas prices and new data released today showing wholesale prices declining against expectations in July.

“We are continuing to see encouraging economic developments, including strong job growth and lower energy prices,” Rouse said. She called on Congress to pass the Biden administration’s marquee spending plan to address climate change and lower health care costs.

“While the news from this week is encouraging, we have more work to do to bring inflation down, without giving up the substantial economic and labor market gains of the past year. Congress should pass the Inflation Reduction Act as soon as possible, which will help our economy address some of its most important near-term and long-term challenges.”