- Donald Trump had innumerable "worst weeks" during his presidency.
- This might be his worst one since leaving office, kickstarted on Monday by the FBI raiding his home.
Between the Mueller probe, civil and criminal investigations into his business dealings, two impeachments, and a number of congressional ethics inquiries, then-President Donald Trump was no stranger to legal minefields when he was in the White House.
Trump's personal and financial troubles, coupled with the myriad political controversies he was at the center of, spawned dozens of headlines declaring any number of weeks the "worst" of his presidency (like this one, this one, and this one).
Bad weeks aside, Trump left office relatively unscathed — give or take paying a few million in damages for illegally using Trump Foundation funds and half a dozen of his closest associates being charged with federal crimes.
But this week added a new chapter in the long-running narrative of Trump's post-presidency as he inches closer to running for a second term in 2024.
It started Monday when the FBI executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump wasn't home at the time, but the raid still sent shockwaves through the media and political sphere, as well as the national security community, as the reality set in that there's a very active criminal case against the former president of the United States.
While the public was grappling with the fallout from the FBI's raid, a US appeals court panel in Washington, DC, on Tuesday cleared the way for the powerful House Ways and Means Committee to access years of Trump's closely-held tax returns. That happened on the same day that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a longtime Trump loyalist, testified before the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.
Adding to the week's drama, Trump on Wednesday issued a statement saying he had invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a long-awaited deposition with New York attorney general Tish James. James' office is conducting a sprawling investigation into whether the Trump Organization engaged in financial fraud and violated tax, insurance, and banking laws.
"There is no one who would say that Donald didn't have a very bad few days," Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime former lawyer whose home was also raided by the FBI in 2018, told Insider. "The raid on Mar-a-Lago as well as the ability for Congress to obtain Trump's tax returns are the double whammy of trouble for Donald; and he knows it."
'A search warrant of this magnitude is historic'
Andrew Weissmann, a former FBI general counsel who later worked on the Mueller investigation, said his key takeaway from Monday's raid was that the FBI decided to go the search warrant route rather than issuing a subpoena.
"You use a search warrant, and not a subpoena, when you don't believe that the person is actually going to comply," Weissmann told The New Yorker.
"For me, the biggest takeaway is that the attorney general of the United States had to make the determination that it was appropriate in this situation to proceed by search warrant because they could not be confident that the former president of the United States would comply with a grand-jury subpoena," he added.
Gene Rossi, a former assistant US attorney from northern Virginia, also didn't mince words when describing the move's significance.
"I was sitting in front of the television last night and I was saying to my wife, 'They executed a search warrant on a former president of the United States' home.' I couldn't believe I even said that," Rossi told Insider.
"A search warrant of this magnitude is historic," he added. "When I was with the Justice Department, if we even thought about presenting a search warrant for a member of Congress, a governor, an elected official at any level, the level of review and ... fly specking of that affidavit in support of that search warrant is enormous."
In this case, legal experts say the process of obtaining the search warrant likely started weeks ago and that it was approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department, including FBI Director Christopher Wray — who Trump appointed in 2017 after firing James Comey — and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Rossi also noted that searching Trump's home is akin to invading a nuclear power plant because of the sensitivity of what federal agents might uncover.
That's because in addition to material that could be protected by executive privilege or attorney-client privilege, Trump also may have been in possession of information that make up the crown jewels of the national security apparatus, like nuclear secrets, the location of missile silos, and strategic maps.
To that end, the Justice Department will likely put together what's known as a taint team — a group of prosecutors or agents who go through the seized documents and determine which of them are privileged or contain critical national-security information.
ABC News reported that the warrant was related to 15 boxes of documents that Trump moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving the presidency. The National Archives and Records Administration asked the Justice Department in February to investigate if Trump's handling of the boxes, some of which contained classified information, violated the Presidential Records Act.
But Rossi said he would be "shocked" if the affidavit supporting the warrant didn't include probable cause suggesting Trump violated other laws including statutes against obstruction, insurrection, sedition, and more.
"You only get one shot at doing a search of Donald Trump's home," he said. "The Department of Justice is not going to blow their wad, in my view, on just looking at ... the records statute."
Moreover, once agents are lawfully inside someone's home or office, the plain view doctrine kicks in, meaning that if an investigator sees evidence of a crime not covered by a search warrant, they can seize that evidence if it's clearly visible.
In his statement confirming the raid on Monday, Trump said FBI agents "broke into" his safe. It's unclear what, if anything, was seized from the safe, but Justice Department veterans have said that depending on what investigators find, Trump could also be facing additional legal jeopardy related to his taxes and finances.
Speaking of Trump's taxes...
Just one day after news of the FBI's raid broke, the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, dealt another massive blow to Trump.
After a lengthy legal battle, a three-judge panel on the court ruled that the House Ways and Means Committee can get access to six years of Trump's tax returns.
Trump broke decades of precedent by refusing to release his personal tax returns while running for president, citing an ongoing audit. In 2019, Rep. Richard Neal, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, requested six years of Trump's taxes from the IRS as part of a wide-ranging investigation into the agency's auditing process.
Tuesday's ruling was a resounding defeat for the former president following years of back and forth between between the committee, Trump, and the Treasury Department. Minutes after the ruling dropped, the Ways and Means Committee said it expected to obtain the "requested tax returns and audit files immediately."
The imminent release of Trump's taxes also comes as he and his family members sit for depositions as part of James' probe into the Trump Organization.
Trump's two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, were deposed last week, and Trump was seen arriving at James' office Wednesday morning for his highly anticipated deposition in the civil probe. A short while later, the former president released a statement saying he listened to his attorney's advice and would plead the Fifth Amendment "under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution."
Congress and the DOJ's Jan. 6 investigations are still gaining steam
With the FBI's raid and Congress' win on the Trump tax front dominating headlines, other ongoing federal and congressional investigations into Trump's actions took a backseat. But there were still notable developments this past week in both Congress' inquiry into the January 6 Capitol riot and the Justice Department's criminal probe of the attack.
According to CNN, the panel's questions to Pompeo Tuesday were expected to center around whether Trump's Cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office following the deadly insurrection.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who sits on the committee, declined to discuss the specifics of Pompeo's testimony to CNN but noted that "he came in willingly, and he did answer questions for quite some time."
The Justice Department, meanwhile, appears to be zeroing in on Trump and his inner circle as it continues its wide-ranging investigation into the Capitol riot and events surrounding it.
In recent weeks, several former high-ranking White House officials were subpoenaed by grand juries investigating events connected to the Capitol siege.
Now, Trump's lawyers are increasingly worried about the former president's own possible legal exposure as it relates to the riot. According to CNN, Trump's attorneys are in talks with the Justice Department about if he can invoke executive privilege over some conversations that are being scrutinized, and they've also warned Trump that indictments are on the horizon, but he's shrugged off their concerns so far.
Last month, however, Garland suggested to NBC News that he hasn't ruled out charging Trump with a crime related to the riot.
"Look, we pursue justice without fear or favor. We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable, that's what we do," Garland said. "We don't pay any attention to other issues with respect to that."