Overly Broad?

Victoria Taft points out something crystal clear from the beginning, the search warrant was for anything that Trump touched since becoming President.  The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution says that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

A warrant that authorized police to seize anything I wrote, touched, or recorded since going to work, is prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.  But that's what the search warrant issued to raid Trump's home did.  

 Was this why the warrant was so vague and “overly broad”? How could a warrant that had under its aegis every piece of paper ever generated during Trump’s presidency not be overly broad? “Overly broad” is a legal term of art suggesting we are veering into unconstitutional territory. That’s a Fourth Amendment no-no and it goes to the very reason why patriots escaped to the colonies and declared their independence from the Crown.

It may answer the question of why the FBI combed through Melania Trump’s under lovelies and hired a safecracker. They didn’t seem to know what they were looking for.

This is why it appears this was a raid in search of a crime.

As I wrote at PJ Media shortly after the raid:

The warrant demands that agents remove binders of photographs, documents with classification markings on them, and, the coups de grâce, “any physical documents with classification markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes.”

The warrant covers any documents that Trump touched between his first day and last day in office. This included, “information, including communications in any form, regarding the retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material, any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021.”

 Later, anti-Trump prosecutors showed atypical humility and admitted that, yes, they’d “over collected” documents such as Trump’s passports and privileged documents between Trump and his attorneys. This is no small thing. This is enough to get evidence and possibly the whole case thrown out by a judge. Fruits of the poisonous tree and all that. If agents had an appropriately tailored search warrant and had the judge bothered to look at the underlying documents, then privileged documents that were clearly out of the scope of the warrant wouldn’t have been confiscated. That is unless Trump and his attorneys were scoring crack, smoking meth, doing deals to get raw materials to make lithium batteries for the Chi-coms, and getting payoffs from the Ukrainians and Russkies. Wait, sorry, that’s Hunter Biden and The Big Guy.