Garland’s Own DOJ Fixer Privately Questioned the Mar-a-Lago Raid Two Days After It Happened
A newly disclosed email shows a top Biden DOJ veteran raising declassification and prosecutorial ethics concerns forty-eight hours after the FBI walked into Trump's Florida home.
A long-time Justice Department official handpicked by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to consult on Trump-related cases privately raised legal “concerns” about the August 8, 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago just two days after it happened, according to an email obtained by Just the News and first reported by John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy. The email was recently uncovered by the Justice Department as part of its ongoing review of the weaponization of federal law enforcement.
Patty Stemler, who ran the DOJ’s Criminal Appellate Section for three decades before retiring in February 2022 and returning as a Garland consultant, wrote to Sophia Brill — then an attorney inside the DOJ’s National Security Division and later a Biden White House lawyer — on August 10, 2022. “I didn’t know about this search in advance, but I have been worrying about it ever since and worrying more now,” Stemler told Brill. “Doesn’t Trump maintain that he had the authority to declassify documents while he was still President? 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.”
Stemler went further, questioning whether prosecutors could even publicly disclose the contents of what was seized without violating ethical limits. “I don’t know if we intend to charge anyone with respect to the classified documents seized yesterday, but if we disclose that we found X classified documents before we seek an indictment, will that trench on any fair trial rights or violate the ethical obligations of a prosecutor?” she asked, comparing the situation to the Ashcroft-era post-9/11 disclosures and naming former DOJ appellate attorney Elizabeth Collery, who she said had previously drafted guidance to keep the attorney general’s office out of trouble on that exact question.
Stemler’s reputation inside the building gives the email weight. Bloomberg Law dubbed her “Justice Fixer Stemler” when she retired in February 2022, describing her as the “discreet and publicity-shy problem solver” prosecutors and senior officials had turned to for decades. She had been promoted to lead the appellate section in 1992 by Robert Mueller, then the DOJ Criminal Division chief and later FBI director and Russiagate special counsel. The Federal Bar Association gave her the Justice Tom C. Clark Award for Outstanding Government Lawyer in 2023, with Garland publicly praising her. Garland himself has confirmed he “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant” for the raid, which included agents searching Melania Trump’s underwear drawers.
The email is the second known piece of internal federal law enforcement unease with the Mar-a-Lago operation. FBI Director Kash Patel previously provided Congress with evidence that agents did not believe they had met the probable cause standard required for the raid but moved forward anyway. FFox News Digital reported in December 2025, after reviewing newly declassified emails, that FBI officials had expressed concerns about a lack of probable cause to execute the search warrant in the months leading up to the August 2022 raid, with one official saying he didn’t “give a damn about the optics.”
The declassification question Stemler raised was not invented after the fact. Trump attorney Evan Corcoran had sent a May 2022 letter to Jay Bratt, chief of the DOJ’s counterintelligence and export control section, arguing that “Under the U.S. Constitution, the President is vested with the highest level of authority when it comes to the classification and declassification of documents” and that “the primary criminal statute that governs the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material does not apply to the President.” Trump’s office told Just the News in mid-August 2022 that he had operated under a “standing order” deeming documents removed from the Oval Office to the residence declassified. Patel, then a former Trump intelligence and defense official, told Breitbart that “Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government” and that “the White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified.”
The Obama-era Executive Order 13526, which governed classification during Trump’s first term, explicitly exempted the sitting president and vice president from the procedures it laid out for everyone else — a point Trump attorney Christopher Kise pressed in a September 2022 court filing, writing that the order “designates the President as an original classification authority, and grants authority to declassify information to either the official who originally classified the information or that individual’s supervisors — necessarily including the President.” The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals nonetheless overruled Judge Aileen Cannon’s appointment of a special master in late September 2022, calling the declassification argument “a red herring” because, the panel wrote, declassifying a document “would not change its content or render it personal.” Judge Cannon ultimately dismissed the classified documents case against Trump in July 2024, ruling that Jack Smith had been unlawfully appointed as special counsel, and Smith dropped his appeal after Trump won the 2024 election.
Sophia Brill, the recipient of Stemler’s email, is now at Gibson Dunn, where she has been involved in the firm’s amicus brief on behalf of the Democracy Defenders Fund supporting Anthropic in its lawsuit against the Trump administration over the Pentagon designating the AI company a “supply chain risk.”
The Stemler revelation comes one week after the Justice Department indicted Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, a managing assistant U.S. attorney in the Fort Pierce branch of the Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office, on charges of theft of government property and concealment and falsification of federal records for allegedly emailing herself a copy of Jack Smith’s sealed Volume II of the special counsel report disguised as cake recipes. Lineberger has pleaded not guilty.
Original Source: Just The News
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