WASHINGTON — Justice Department investigators have sought to interview law enforcement officials related to the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as part of a Florida-based inquiry aiming to establish a conspiracy against the Republican president, multiple people familiar with the matter said Thursday.
The requests for interviews, made in recent weeks, suggest that a conspiracy investigation that had mostly appeared focused on the decade-old question of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is also examining a more contemporary event – the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago that resulted in the FBI seizing top secret documents from the president’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate.
The requests were for voluntary interviews and not made through subpoenas, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation with The Associated Press.
It is not clear when or if prosecutors might seek to bring charges, or for what, but investigating conduct that occurred in Florida might give the Justice Department the legal hook it needs to try to anchor a prosecution in the state.
Joe diGenova, the prosecutor brought back to the Justice Department in April to oversee the investigation, declined to comment when contacted by AP on Thursday. The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump was indicted in 2023 on charges of unlawfully retaining classified documents and of obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. But the case was dismissed the following year after a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, ruled that the prosecutor who brought the indictment, Jack Smith, had been illegally appointed.
Trump has long maintained that law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against him over the last decade, drawing a straight line between an investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign and the more recent investigations related to his retention of classified documents and his efforts to undo the 2020 election.
The Justice Department has for months conducted an investigation in Florida in hopes of proving wrongdoing by the officials involved in scrutinizing Trump.
Much of the questioning known to have occurred so far has centered on the government response to Russian interference in the 2016 election and the creation of an intelligence community assessment that documented the extent of the meddling.
It was not immediately clear why investigators want to question FBI officials in connection with the Mar-a-Lago search, but the act has long infuriated Trump, who decried it as an invasion of privacy.
In addition, congressional Republicans have long seized on accounts of tension between FBI officials and senior Justice Department leaders before the search to raise questions about whether there was an adequate justification for it, though the law enforcement dispute centered not on whether investigators had gathered sufficient evidence for a search but rather on whether there was a less dramatic and intrusive way to recover the records.
