Chad Mizelle, former chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, revealed that the Biden White House was actively “coordinating” with the Department of Justice regarding an FBI search for classified documents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence - before the discussion later moved “offline.”
In an interview with the New York Post, Mizelle said he had reviewed “smoking-gun emails” exchanged in the months leading up to the controversial raid. The messages involved officials from President Joe Biden’s White House Counsel’s Office, Merrick Garland’s DOJ, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), indicating significant coordination among the agencies.
Mizelle said he personally reviewed email exchanges between officials at Biden’s White House Counsel’s Office, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, and the National Archives and Records Administration in the months before the raid on President Donald Trump’s Florida residence. The emails showed detailed discussions about the Trump records, with the National Archives serving as custodian of the documents.
At one point, a Biden White House official proposed taking the conversation “offline,” likely to prevent it from being preserved under federal disclosure laws. After that suggestion, the email trail abruptly ended.
"We have concrete evidence that Biden's White House was very much involved in the most unprecedented, unjust and improper law enforcement act, really in the history of our country, which is to use the FBI to raid the home of a political rival and former president of the United States," Mizelle said. He explained that the abrupt end of email communications made clear that the White House was coordinating the effort and deliberately putting Justice Department officials in contact with the National Archives about the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago.
The revelation follows the release of internal FBI and Justice Department memos showing that the bureau's Washington field office believed agents lacked probable cause to execute the Mar-a-Lago search warrant before the raid.
A source familiar with the emails confirmed to reporters that the conversations Mizelle described do exist.
The emails as described by Mizelle also clash with DOJ’s purported independence from the commander-in-chief as well as a memo put out by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, limiting officials’ interactions with the White House.
“[T]he Justice Department will not advise the White House concerning pending or contemplated criminal or civil law enforcement investigations or cases unless doing so is important for the performance of the President’s duties and appropriate from a law enforcement perspective,” the July 21, 2021, memo stated.
Biden White House aides insisted that the president was not aware of the FBI’s planned search beforehand — with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declining to comment 18 times on the unprecedented action the day after the raid.
“If they have a memo that they’re violating, that’s a problem,” Mizelle, who left the DOJ in September, said when asked about the memo. “If they tell the American people they’re not involved and they were in fact involved, that’s a problem.”
Trump’s legal team alleged that the National Archives, the White House Counsel’s Office, and senior Justice Department and FBI officials closely coordinated the Mar-a-Lago investigation. Attorneys Todd Blanche and Christopher Kise described the evidence as “disturbing but not surprising,” pointing to a May 2022 letter from acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall, which referenced communications with the White House Counsel. Trump’s lawyers argued this suggested the Archives were acting as an arm of the prosecution.
After Wall’s letter, a federal grand jury subpoenaed the documents, and Trump’s team turned over an initial batch on June 3, 2022. Trump’s team sought all communications about the raid, but prosecutors claimed privilege over certain internal DOJ emails. The Biden administration long claimed there was limited involvement in the missing records case, but the evidence proves otherwise.
What began as a routine archival retrieval escalated sharply when Garland launched a criminal investigation in March 2022. The FBI ultimately seized 102 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago, leading to Trump’s June 2023 indictment.
Mizelle noted that the emails he reviewed contradict claims that the Biden White House had no role in the decision to raid Trump’s residence. Officials appear to have moved discussions offline to avoid creating a paper trail, but the tone of the communications sent an unmistakable directive to the Justice Department to act.
Trump’s team continues to investigate the raid, probing the involvement of multiple agencies and the White House in what some see as a coordinated effort to target a political rival.
Ironically, months after the raid on Mar-a-Lago, it emerged that Joe Biden mishandled classified documents, first at his Penn Biden Center office in D.C., then at his Wilmington, Delaware home. Biden was ultimately let off the hook in February 2024, after Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that while Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” and chose not to recommend prosecution.
Meanwhile, the case against Trump collapsed in July 2024 after a judge ruled that Special Counsel Jack Smith had been improperly appointed.
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