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Posted on 08/15/2022 7:13:10 PM PDT by bitt

FBI agents may also have mistakenly collected privileged documents and plan to return those.

In an acknowledgment the FBI over-collected evidence during the Mar-a-Lago raid, the Justice Department informed Donald Trump's team Monday that agents seized the former president's passports and are obligated to return them, Just the News has learned.

The department was making plans Monday evening to return the passports and has also alerted defense lawyers the FBI may have obtained materials covered by various privileges that will be returned in the next two weeks, two sources told Just the News.

DOJ has designated a process for separating materials that could be covered by executive privilege or attorney client privilege, the sources said.

"Occasionally a warrant collection can grab things outside the scope authorized by the court and the department is now following a procedure we would for any person affected this way," one official said Monday night.

The sources spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the communications between the two sides are confidential.

The revelation came as Trump lawyers are discussing whether to go to court to demand a special legal officer be designated to review Trump evidence that was seized that was outside the scope of the warrant.

A former senior FBI executive said it was surprising that agents collected evidence outside the scope of the warrant because it was already worded unusually broad, unlike most warrants he said during his tenure.

"Trump’s attorneys could have a runway to argue the scope of the search is overly broad," retired Assistant FBI Director Kevin Brock said. "Search warrants normally require a level of specificity that seems to be missing in this warrant. Specificity is important in order to protect 4th Amendment rights from exuberant government overreach designed to find whatever they can."

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, whose conservative watchdog regularly sues the government to release documents and is seeking to compel release of documents in the Trump search, said the government's first court filings appear to describe an overly broad search that went far beyond classified records.

"They were engaged in a fishing expedition, and the warrant itself wasn’t about classified information, though it mentioned it," Fitton told Just the News. "It talked about all sort of other documents. It basically gave the FBI carte blanc to anything they wanted from the Trump home.

"And the fact that a judge signed off on it is very troubling," he added.

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