The FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida has left both supporters and critics of the ex-president alike questioning why the Justice Department would take such an unprecedented step.

Adding to the speculation is the total silence (so far) from the DOJ as well as the refusal from Mr Trump himself to produce a copy of the warrant and show publicly what the stated reasoning was for the search.

One possibility that has begun to be discussed by analysts familiar with presidential records procedures is the potential that the investigation involves not just a simple breach of the Federal Records Act but is actually focused on an alleged breach of the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law most known for dealing with the theft of information that could harm national security.

While the law typically is thought to involve acts of spying against the United State (hence the name), it also contains one provision that could very well deal with the situation that has arisen at Mr Trump’s resort home: the handling of classified documents related to US defence policy or capabilities, and the punishments for negligent management of such files.

The Act specifically states that anyone who “through gross negligence permits [such documents] to be removed from [their] proper place of custody” can face a fine or imprisonment of up to ten years.

That’s where the boxes at Mar-a-Lago come in. If any of the documents in the now reportedly more than two dozen removed from Mr Trump’s property between his own efforts to return files earlier this year and the raid on Monday deal with the US armed forces or related topics, the question of whether their removal and storage at the minimally-secure Palm Beach location constitutes gross negligence. Mr Trump’s properties continue to have Secret Service protection, but the agency’s footprint is minimal when he is out of town.

There’s some evidence lending credence to the theory that the FBI’s investigation could involve the Espionage Act: specifically, the involvement of a top DOJ official in charge of the agency’s counterintelligence division.

The participation of Jay Bratt, chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) of the DOJ’s national security team, suggests that the interest of federal authorities could very well extend into the realm of national security threats. Mr Bratt was reported by CNN to have attended the June excursion of DOJ officials to Mar-a-Lago, which preceded Monday’s raid and came as the president has been battling the National Archives over documents taken from the White House for months.

At the time, Mr Bratt was reported to have examined the area in which the documents were being stored. That suggests again that investigators are interested in determining whether they were being handled and kept safe with proper care, or whether any were lost, destroyed, or even stolen during the removal of the boxes from the White House.

A veteran of the Justice Department, former national security division chief Mary McCord, suggested that theory was possible during an interview with the Skullduggery podcast this week.

“[T]he fact that we have a national security division lawyer such as Jay Bratt, the head of counterintelligence and export control, does mean that we’re talking about national security implications, not simply presidential records that aren’t classified,” she remarked.

Mentioning the Espionage Act, she added that the law “actually has provisions that apply to essentially the mishandling through gross negligence, permitting documents to be removed from their proper place, or to be lost, stolen, or destroyed”.

For now it remains unclear how far the Justice Department’s raid on Mr Trump’s property will reach, and whether it will affect any of the ongoing investigations into Mr Trump for his conduct after the 2020 election.

The former president remains under investigation in Georgia for his attempts to push officials there to overturn the election, and a separate grand jury investigation which has recently interviewed a top staffer to Mike Pence is ongoing in Washington, headed by the Justice Department.

The DOJ remains unlikely to comment on specifics of the raid in the immediate days ahead, and White House officials have said that Joe Biden has not been briefed on the specifics of the investigation either.

The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek.

The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump‘s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur when the former president was away.

A confidential informer told the FBI what documents Donald Trump was hiding at Mar-a-Lago, and where. The former president at a rally on August 05, 2022 in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Scott Olson/Getty Images

FBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Justice Department official who is a 30-year veteran of the FBI.

The effort to keep the raid low-key failed: instead, it prompted a furious response from GOP leaders and Trump supporters. “What a spectacular backfire,” says the Justice official.

“I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action,” the official says. “They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite.”

Both senior government officials say the raid was scheduled with no political motive, the FBI solely intent on recovering highly classified documents that were illegally removed from the White House.Preparations to conduct such an operation began weeks ago, but in planning the date and time, the FBI Miami Field Office and Washington headquarters were focused on the former president’s scheduled return to Florida from his residences in New York and New Jersey.

“They were seeking to avoid any media circus,” says the second source, a senior intelligence official who was briefed on the investigation and the operation. “So even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout.”

A “Florida For Trump” flag being displayed outside Mar-a-Lago following the FBI search.
Eva Marie Uzcategui/GETTY

On Monday at about 6 p.m. EST, two dozen FBI agents and technicians showed up at Donald Trump’s Florida home to execute a search warrant to obtain any government-owned documents that might be in the possession of Trump but are required to be delivered to the Archives under the provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act. (In response to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, Trump himself signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain classified documents.)

The act establishes that presidential records are the property of the U.S. government and not a president’s private property. Put in place after Watergate to avoid the abuses of the Nixon administration, the law imposes strict penalties for failure to comply. “Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined” $2,000, up to three years in prison or “shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”

The act, and concerns about the illegal possession of classified “national defense information” are the bases for the search warrant, according to the two sources. The raid had nothing to do with the January 6 investigation or any other alleged wrongdoing by the former president.

The road to the raid began a year-and-a-half ago, when in the transition from the Trump administration to that of President Joe Biden, there were immediate questions raised by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as to whether the presidential records turned over to the federal agency for historical preservation were complete or not.

In February, Archivist David Ferriero testified before Congress that his agency began talking with Trump’s people right after they left office and that the Trump camp had already returned 15 boxes of documents to the Archives. Ferriero said that in those materials, the Archives discovered items “marked as classified national security information,” unleashing further inquiries as to whether Trump continued to possess classified material.

The basic outlines of the facts surrounding this timeline have been confirmed by the former president. He has previously said that he was returning any official records to the Archives, labeling any confusion in the matter as “an ordinary and routine process to ensure the preservation of my legacy and in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.” He also claimed the Archives “did not ‘find’ anything” in what he had already been returned, suggesting that there was nothing sensitive. He said the documents had inadvertently shipped to Florida during the six-hour transition period in which his belongings were moved.

According to the Justice Department source, the Archives saw things differently, believing that the former White House was stonewalling and continued to possess unauthorized material. Earlier this year, they asked the Justice Department to investigate.

In late April, the source says, a federal grand jury began deliberating whether there was a violation of the Presidential Records Act or whether President Trump unlawfully possessed national security information. Through the grand jury process, the National Archives provided federal prosecutors with copies of the documents received from former President Trump in January 2022. The grand jury concluded that there had been a violation of the law, according to the Justice Department source.

In the past week, the prosecutor in the case and local Assistant U.S. Attorney went to Florida magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in West Palm Beach to seek approval for the search of Donald Trump’s private residence. The affidavit to obtain the search warrant, the intelligence source says, contained abundant and persuasive detail that Trump continued to possess the relevant records in violation of federal law, and that investigators had sufficient information to prove that those records were located at Mar-a-Lago—including the detail that they were contained in a specific safe in a specific room.

“In order for the investigators to convince the Florida judge to approve such an unprecedented raid, the information had to be solid, which the FBI claimed,” says the intelligence source.

According to experts familiar with FBI practices, Judge Reinhart reviewed the prosecutor’s evidence and asked numerous questions about the sources and the urgency. The judge signed a search warrant allowing the FBI to look for relevant material and the FBI then planned the operation, wanting to conduct the raid while Trump was spending time at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. A Secret Service source who spoke on background said the Secret Service director was given advance warning and was later told the specifics of the raid.

Because the Secret Service is still responsible for protecting the former president, his family, and his property, the FBI had to coordinate with the Secret Service to gain access to the grounds.

A convoy of unmarked black SUVs and a Ryder rental truck filled with about three dozen FBI special agents and technicians entered the gates in the early evening. Heavily armed Secret Service agents were also visibly present at the gates. The Palm Beach Police Department was also present at the scene.

The entire operation was conducted relatively stealthily. No FBI people were seen in their iconic blue windbreakers announcing the presence of the Bureau. And though local law enforcement was present, the Palm Beach Police Department was careful to tweet on Tuesday that it “was not aware of the existence of a search warrant nor did our department assist the FBI in the execution of a search warrant.”

According to news media reports, some 10-15 boxes of documents were removed from the premises. Donald Trump said in a statement that the FBI opened his personal safe as part of their search. Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan, who was present during the multi-hour search, says that the FBI targeted three rooms—a bedroom, an office and a storage room. That suggests that the FBI knew specifically where to look.

“This unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” former President Trump said in a statement. He called the raid “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.”

Though Trump and his Republican Party allies are portraying the raid as politically motivated, it is likely the unprecedented nature of the raid on the property of a former president that will have the greatest reverberation. Even Trump’s political rivals have rallied in condemning the FBI.

Former Vice President Mike Pence tweeted that “no former President of the United States has ever been subject to a raid of their personal residence in American history.” Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State and CIA director, tweeted that Attorney General Merrick Garland “must explain why 250 yrs of practice was upended w/ this raid. I served on Benghazi Com[mittee] where we proved Hillary possessed classified info. We didn’t raid her home.”

The Biden White House says the president was not briefed about the Mar-a-Lago raid and knew nothing about it in advance. “The Justice Department conducts investigations independently and we leave any law enforcement matters to them,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday afternoon. “It would not be appropriate for us to comment on any ongoing investigations.”

As U.S. President Joe Biden, appearing via teleconference, looks on, Attorney General Merrick Garland attends a meeting of the Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access during an event at the White House complex August 3, 2022 in Washington, DC.
Win McNamee/Getty Images

The senior Justice Department source says that Garland was regularly briefed on the Records Act investigation, and that he knew about the grand jury and what material federal prosecutors were seeking. He insists, though, that Garland had no prior knowledge of the date and time of the specific raid, nor was he asked to approve it. “I know it’s hard for people to believe,” says the official, “but this was a matter for the U.S. Attorney and the FBI.”

FBI director Christopher Wray ultimately gave his go-ahead to conduct the raid, the senior Justice official says. “It really is a case of the Bureau misreading the impact.”

House begins with a primer on the intelligence community and the process of turning raw information into usable intelligence to set the stage for the discussion of the interface between consumers and producers of intelligence. Although this may be redundant for readers with experience in the intelligence community, it is a very clear explanation that would be useful to students and those readers whose ideas about intelligence were formed primarily by popular media. Chapter 2 concisely explains the various sources of intelligence—SIGINT, HUMINT, etc—as well as the terminology used in assessments to indicate the level of confidence analysts have in a particular piece of information. This gets to a critical issue that House explores further in the following chapters: the inherent mismatch between what policy makers often desire and what intelligence analysts can provide. As House notes, “analysis is not simply ‘establishing the facts’ or ‘connecting the dots,’ since in many instances some of those facts or dots are unknown or unknowable.”[1] Despite this, policy makers often desire a level of certainty that cannot be provided and become frustrated with the language used by analysts to maintain objectivity. This can result in situations where, “some decision makers regard qualifying adverbs-including ‘apparently,’ ‘probably,’ and ‘presumably’- as being an effort not to report accurately but rather to avoid responsibility for being wrong.”[2]

Intelligence assessments are usually phrased in terms of relative probabilities, which gives policy makers an ability to choose the assessment that comports most closely with their preferred outcome.

Intelligence analysts may have detailed knowledge, but they must also confront the biases inherent in policy makers whom they serve. Intelligence products are rarely definitive, and there are likely different pieces of information that can support conclusions that confirm policy makers’ desired course of action, even if the analysts’ assessment points in a different, even opposite, direction. Intelligence assessments are usually phrased in terms of relative probabilities, which gives policy makers an ability to choose the assessment that comports most closely with their preferred outcome. This is a long-standing problem in the relationship between analysts and policy makers, but it takes on additional importance as increasingly large amounts of raw information are available to anyone through internet search engines. As House notes, “search algorithms frequently identify the most often cited sources, but ‘most often cited’ is not the same as ‘most accurate.’ The subconscious belief that a Google search can correctly answer any question constitutes yet another barrier to communication between decision makers and analysts.”[3]

Chapter 3 gets to the heart of the matter and here the author’s personal experience and expertise shows most clearly. A fairly detailed assessment of the relationship between the intelligence analysis and policy makers in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War is particularly illustrative of the issues raised by the author in the first two chapters. Rather than accept the assessment of intelligence analysts, policy makers continually pushed intelligence analysts to go back to find the evidence needed to support the preferred policy. The lead up to the 2003 Iraq War also demonstrates another significant point to which House gives particular attention: the role of intelligence community managers. The policy makers’ expectation of constant briefings by high-level intelligence community managers means that managers spend much more time on the briefing process than running their departments compared to similarly placed officials in other bureaucracies.

A closely related point raised by House is highly salient: the importance of the right personnel in the key management positions in the intelligence community. High level IC officials must understand the intelligence process and have the confidence of the policy making officials. Yet, those same officials must also not be so close to an administration that they become wrapped up in their policy preferences and offer a level of confidence in intelligence assessments that is potentially misleading. As House states, “Intelligence exists to serve policy decisions, but that does not mean the analytical products should bend to the preferences of policy.”[4] Still, in the inherent dynamic between policy maker superiors and intelligence analyst subordinates, there is always a danger that this can happen with potentially disastrous results.

House devotes a considerable amount of attention to the development of intelligence services in Europe and in the U.S. in chapters 4 and 5. It is an interesting history that makes an important point: most European intelligence services developed before the U.S. did so, and mostly for domestic security reasons. The foreign intelligence component was built in because of international connections to domestic threats to the regimes. But while interesting, there is little connection made to the main themes of the book. The same largely goes for the historical section on the US. It is a useful historical overview, but much of it is not directly relevant to the core ideas of the volume. As a result, the volume often seems disjointed, covering a range of topics without linking them together in a completely coherent manner.

The Paradox of Warning: If the intelligence community gets it right and effective action is taken by policy makers, then the predicted event never occurs, and “…the intelligence officer/agency becomes the boy who cried wolf.

House also focuses on the unwelcome surprises that have confronted the intelligence community. From Pearl Harbor through the September 11th terrorist attacks, there is an unfortunately lengthy list of major strikes against the United States that slipped through the web of the intelligence community. House dives into a number of American cases such as Pearl Harbor, the Chinese intervention in the Korean war, and the Cuban missile crisis, as well as notable cases of warning failure in states as divergent as Nazi Germany and modern Israel. We should be careful to avoid characterizing all surprise as forms of intelligence failure, because as the author stresses, our understanding of surprise is based entirely on the things that slip through the net. Chapter 7 is titled, “The Paradox of Warning” for this exact reason. If the intelligence community gets it right and effective action is taken by policy makers, then the predicted event never occurs, and “…the intelligence officer/agency becomes the boy who cried wolf. The very fact that the intelligence system succeeds causes it to look like a failure.”[5]

Despite the author’s extensive treatment of the key issues at hand, there are also some oddly short-changed sections. Politicization of intelligence is tacked on to a chapter on the more modern history of the US intelligence community, but it seems to be an afterthought. Given the alarming intrusion of partisan politics in the intelligence process documented by both the Robert Mueller and John Durham investigations into Russian interference in American elections, it seems to be a topic that would merit more than a page in a work of this nature. Likewise, there is a section on cognitive biases that is helpful but somewhat incomplete given how important these are to the problems addressed in the book. A bit more detail here and more reference to the voluminous literature on the subject would be welcome. Cognitive biases are well known, and the human mind is highly likely to attach more significance to information that confirms a desired course of action and discount information than disconfirms it. House mentions that analysts are trained to minimize the cognitive biases that often distort decision making, but does not go further on this. It would be an interesting point to bring out because there is a possibility that some of that training could be generalized to a broader policy community.

On the whole, however, the flaws in House’s book are minor compared to the value it offers. Intelligence and the State would be a welcome addition to any course on intelligence at an undergraduate or graduate level, as it provides both historical depth and contemporary relevance in a compact format. It will also hopefully be read by policy makers and intelligence professionals seeking to avoid some of the errors of their predecessors.

Mark T. RossiniFormer federal agent who participated in a bribery scheme against a former governor Wanda Vazquez GarcedoHe turned himself in before federal authorities in Puerto Rico and appeared for a trial on criminal charges against him this Tuesday.

Appearance before Judge Camille Velez Rive at 11:45 a.m.When he pleaded not guilty to the offenses of conspiracy, bribery and wire fraud.

Rossini was in Madrid Thus, he was not arrested by US authorities at the time of his indictment, on August 3, by a federal grand jury.

Head of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Puerto Rico, Stephen Muldrowconfirmed that Rossini had turned himself in to the offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, in English) in San Juan.

“It was given here”Muldrow said in an interview new day, “He decided to turn himself in and today he has a hearing and we are following the process.”

He said it is best as he does not have to go through the formal extradition process.

However, Muldrow declined to comment on the status of his move to take custody. banker Julio M. Herrera Velutini,

The former FBI agent was charged with conspiracy, bribery with federal funds, and illegal commissions to Vazquez Garsed. Vazquez Gard, also accused of this scheme, Herrera Velutini According to the indictment, the owner of Bancredito International Bank & Trust, which Rossini was advising.

The conspiracy sought to sack the former governor of the Office of the Commissioner for Financial Institutions (OCIF), George Joyner, and appoint someone close to Bancredito, to eliminate the audit to detect suspicious transactions. In the Herrera Velutini account. ,

Journalist Laura Quintero collaborated on this story.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI’s unprecedented search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence ricocheted around government, politics and a polarized country Tuesday along with questions as to why the Justice Department — notably cautious under Attorney General Merrick Garland — decided to take such a drastic step.

Answers weren’t quickly forthcoming.

Agents on Monday searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which is also a private club, as part of a federal investigation into whether the former president took classified records from the White House to his Florida residence, people familiar with the matter said. It marked a dramatic escalation of law enforcement scrutiny of Trump, who faces an array of inquiries tied to his conduct in the waning days of his administration.

From echoes of Watergate to the more immediate House probe of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Washington, a city used to sleepy Augusts, reeled from one speculative or accusatory headline to the next. Was the Justice Department politicized? What prompted it to seek authorization to search the estate for classified documents now, months after it was revealed that Trump had taken boxes of materials with him when he left the White House after losing the 2020 election?

Garland has not tipped his hand despite an outcry from some Democrats impatient over whether the department was even pursuing evidence that has surfaced in the Jan. 6 probe and other investigations— and from Republicans who were swift to echo Trump’s claims that he was the victim of political prosecution.

All Garland has said publicly is that “no one is above the law.”

A federal judge had to sign off on the warrant after establishing that FBI agents had shown probable cause before they could descend on Trump’s shuttered-for-the-season home — he was in New York, a thousand or so miles away, at the time of the search.

Monday’s search intensified the months-long probe into how classified documents ended up in boxes of White House records located at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year. A separate grand jury is investigating efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and it all adds to potential legal peril for Trump as he lays the groundwork for a potential repeat run for the White House.

Trump and his allies quickly sought to cast the search as a weaponization of the criminal justice system and a Democratic-driven effort to keep him from winning another term in 2024 — though the Biden White House said it had no prior knowledge and current FBI Director Christopher Wray was appointed by Trump five years ago.

Trump, disclosing the search in a lengthy statement late Monday, asserted that agents had opened a safe at his home, and he described their work as an “unannounced raid” that he likened to “prosecutorial misconduct.”

Justice Department spokesperson Dena Iverson declined to comment on the search, including whether Garland had personally authorized it. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the West Wing first learned of the search from public media reports and the White House had not been briefed in the run-up or aftermath.

“The Justice Department conducts investigations independently and we leave any law enforcement matters to them,” she said. “We are not involved.”

About two dozen Trump supporters stood in protest at midmorning Tuesday in the Florida summer heat and sporadic light rain on a bridge near the former president’s residence. One held a sign reading “Democrats are Fascists” while others carried flags saying “2020 Was Rigged,” “Trump 2024” and Biden’s name with an obscenity. Some cars honked in support as they passed.

Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence, a potential 2024 rival, tweeted Tuesday, “Yesterday’s action undermines public confidence in our system of justice and Attorney General Garland must give a full accounting to the American people as to why this action was taken and he must do so immediately.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell echoed Pence, saying, “Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately.”

“The FBI director was appointed by Donald Trump,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., when asked about GOP allegations that the raid showed the politicization of the Justice Department. She added, “Facts and truth, facts and law, that’s what it’s about.”

Trump was meeting late Tuesday at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club with members of the Republican Study Committee, a group headed by Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana that says it is committed to putting forth his priorities in Congress.

The FBI reached out to the Secret Service shortly before serving a warrant, a third person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. Secret Service agents contacted the Justice Department and were able to validate the warrant before facilitating access to the estate, the person said.

The Justice Department has been investigating the potential mishandling of classified information since the National Archives and Records Administration said it had received from Mar-a-Lago 15 boxes of White House records, including documents containing classified information, earlier this year. The National Archives said Trump should have turned over that material upon leaving office, and it asked the Justice Department to investigate.

Christina Bobb, a lawyer for Trump, said in an interview that aired on Real America’s Voice on Tuesday that investigators said they were “looking for classified information that they think should not have been removed from the White House, as well as presidential records.”

There are multiple federal laws governing the handling of classified records and sensitive government documents, including statutes that make it a crime to remove such material and retain it at an unauthorized location. Though a search warrant does not necessarily mean criminal charges are near or even expected, federal officials looking to obtain one must first demonstrate to a judge that they have probable cause that a crime occurred.

Two people familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said the search Monday was related to the records probe. Agents were also looking to see if Trump had additional presidential records or any classified documents at the estate.

Trump has previously maintained that presidential records were turned over “in an ordinary and routine process.” His son Eric said on Fox News on Monday night that he had spent the day with his father and that the search happened because “the National Archives wanted to corroborate whether or not Donald Trump had any documents in his possession.”

Trump himself, in a social media post Monday night, called the search a “weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.”

Trump took a different stance during the 2016 presidential campaign, frequently pointing to an FBI investigation into his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information via a private email server she used as secretary of state. Then-FBI Director James Comey concluded that Clinton had sent and received classified information, but the FBI did not recommend criminal charges.

Trump lambasted that decision and then stepped up his criticism of the FBI as agents began investigating whether his campaign had colluded with Russia to tip the 2016 election. He fired Comey during that probe, and though he appointed Wray months later, he repeatedly criticized him, too, as president.

The probe is hardly the only legal headache confronting Trump. A separate investigation related to efforts by him and his allies to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election — which led to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol — has also been intensifying in Washington. Several former White House officials have received grand jury subpoenas.

And a district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, is investigating whether Trump and his close associates sought to interfere in that state’s election, which was won by Democrat Joe Biden.

___

Associated Press writers Terry Spencer, Meg Kinnard, Michelle L. Price, Lisa Mascaro, Alan Fram, Darlene Superville and Will Weissert contributed to this report.

Good morning.

Federal investigators searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida on Monday bearing a warrant that broadly sought presidential and classified records that the justice department believed the former president unlawfully retained, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The criminal nature of the search warrant executed by FBI agents, as described by the sources, suggested the investigation surrounding Trump is firmly a criminal inquiry that comes with potentially far-reaching political and legal ramifications for the former president.

And the extraordinary search, the sources said, came after the justice department grew concerned – as a result of discussions with Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks – that presidential and classified materials were being unlawfully and improperly kept at the Mar-a-Lago resort.

Meanwhile, Republican and rightwing groups have swiftly used the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago to raise money from their supporters by bombarding them with fundraising emails and appeals for donations.

• Could the Mar-a-Lago raid benefit Trump politically? Trump is widely believed to be pursuing a presidential run in 2024. Some suggested that it would fuel his supporters’ suspicion of federal law enforcement officials, whom Trump and his allies have long disparaged as corrupt and biased.

• Why didn’t the FBI just use a subpoena? The fact that the FBI sought a search warrant rather than a subpoena implies it did not trust Trump to hand over or preserve official documents in his possession.

• What else have to FBI done? Federal investigators seized the cellphone of the Republican congressman Scott Perry on Tuesday, his office said. Perry is a close ally of Trump.

Biden administration ends Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy

A US border patrol looks on as people wait to have their identities checked and taken to a processing center in Yuma, Arizona, in June. Photograph: Étienne Laurent/EPA

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that it had ended a Trump-era policy requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings in US immigration court, hours after a judge lifted an order, in effect since December, that the so-called Remain in Mexico rule be reinstated.

The timing had been in doubt since the US supreme court ruled on 30 June that the Biden administration could end the policy.

Homeland security officials had been largely silent, saying they had to wait for the court to certify the ruling and for a Trump-appointed judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, in Amarillo, Texas, to then lift his injunction.

The supreme court certified its ruling last week and critics of the policy had been increasingly outspoken about the Biden administration’s reticence on Remain in Mexico, calling for an immediate end to it.

• What will happen now? The program now will be unwound in a “quick, and orderly manner”, DHS said in a statement. No more people are being enrolled and those who appear in court will not be returned to Mexico when they appear in the US for their next hearings.

• Why did the Biden administration decide to end the policy? The policy “has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs, and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border”, the department said.

‘This is about striking fear’: China’s Taiwan drills the new normal, analysts say

Chinese People’s Liberation Army warplanes conduct what it described as a combat training exercise around Taiwan on Sunday. Photograph: Wang Xinchao/AP

China’s military drills targeting Taiwan have set a new normal, and are likely to “regularise” similar armed exercises off the coast or even more aggressive action much closer to the island, analysts have said.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been conducting live-fire exercises and other drills in the seas around Taiwan’s main island for almost a week, in a purported response to the controversial visit to Taipei by the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

Beijing claims Taiwan as a province. It has not ruled out taking it by force and objects to any and all foreign shows of support for its sovereignty. Taiwan has accused Beijing of using Pelosi’s visit as an excuse to prepare for an invasion.

While some drills are continuing, the big show put on last week has ended, and observers are now trying to assess how the dynamics of the region have changed, and what the future holds for cross-strait relations.

• What does Taiwan think? Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said yesterday there was concern the PLA would “routinise” crossing the median line. He urged the international community to push back, saying Beijing clearly aimed to control the strait.

In other news …

In an article for Vogue, Serena Williams explained her intention to further expand her family was one of the main reasons she was retiring. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

• Serena Williams, one of the greatest athletes of all time and a 23-time grand slam singles champion, has announced that she is retiring from professional tennis, indicating she could step away after the upcoming US Open. Here’s how how Serena Williams became a rare legend.

• Elon Musk has sold $6.9bn (£5.7bn) worth of shares in Tesla after admitting that he could need the funds if he is forced to buy the social media platform. The Tesla chief executive walked away from a $44bn deal to buy Twitter in July but the company has launched a lawsuit demanding that he complete the deal.

• China is racing to stamp out Covid-19 outbreaks in the tourist hubs of Tibet and Hainan, with the authorities launching more rounds of mass testing and closing venues to contain the highly transmissible Omicron variant as Beijing presses ahead with its Covid zero strategy.

• A former Twitter employee has been found guilty of spying on Saudi dissidents using the social media platform and passing their personal information to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A jury found Ahmad Abouammo had acted as an unregistered agent of the Saudi government.

Don’t miss this: A rebel fighter who risked his life for love was murdered, and part of me died too

Naxalite fighters in the forests of Chhattisgarh in 2007: Korsa Joga had been a member of the revolutionary group for many years. Photograph: Mustafa Quraishi/AP

“As a journalist in a conflict zone I was used to covering deaths. But then a young insurgent who had laid down his weapons and become a friend was killed,” writes Ashutosh Bhardwaj. “I was sent photographs on WhatsApp, of his corpse lying on a road in a puddle of blood. In that moment a man deep inside me, who loves, who yearns for love, a part of that man was also murdered. A journalist often lives in bewildering haste, in a frenzied endeavour to locate news in every element around … Imperceptibly, but profoundly, reporting begins to mutate your being. You find yourself ineligible for writing on topics that don’t involve blood or sorrow.”

Climate check: Can citizen scientists turn the tide against America’s toxic algal blooms?

An aerial view of red tide off Florida’s south-west coast. Photograph: Mote Marine Laboratory’s Manatee Research Program

As climate change heats the oceans, predictions of a dangerous phenomenon known as “red tides” are on the rise. Red tides occur a type of rust-colored alga known as Karenia brevis grows, which produces toxic compounds that are harmful to humans as well as dolphins, manatees and other sea life. In an effort to address the threat, the Red Tide Respiratory Forecast was launched. It’s an online map that shows the presence and severity of red tide at select locations, which community of citizen science volunteers contribute to.

Last Thing: The transatlantic battle over a 7ft Frankenstein figure

Schoolchildren get up close with Frankenstein’s monster. Photograph: Getty

Measuring almost 7ft tall, a Frankenstein’s monster mannequin and costume is one of the largest – and strangest – costumes owned by the V&A museum in London. The only problem? The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) thinks it owns it too. The NHM said it was given the monster, and the costume, by Universal Studios in 1935. It in turn lent it to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where it was reported as being destroyed in 1967. So the NHM was a bit surprised when it showed up in London.

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