Merrick Garland dismisses claims of FBI authorization to kill Trump in Mar-A-Lago raid as ‘false

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who notably “personally approved” the FBI’s August 2022 raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, said Tuesday that allegations that the Department of Justice and its principal investigative arm greenlit authorization to “kill the former president” during the Mar-a-Lago raid are “false.”

“The allegation is false. As the FBI has explained, the document that’s being discussed is our standard use-of-force protocol, which is a limitation on the use of force, which is routinely part of the package for search warrants and was part of the package for the search of President Biden’s home as well,” Garland claimed during his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Garland even went so far as to claim that suggesting the FBI could have killed Trump that day, not the reality that the FBI could have killed Trump that day, is “dangerous” and “raises threats of violence” against employees of the DOJ and FBI.

A recently unsealed operations order about the Trump raid confirms the FBI was authorized to use “deadly force” against the Republican and any of the Mar-a-Lago staff if they deemed it “necessary.” FBI agents on the scene were equipped with “Standard Issue Weapon, Ammo, [and] Handcuffs” and “medium and large sized bolt cutters” in their quest to sift through Trump’s presidential belongings.

Shortly after the key documents were publicized, Trump accurately noted in several campaign fundraising emails that “Biden’s DOJ was authorized to shoot me!” Nothing about Trump’s statement was inaccurate, yet corrupt corporate media outlets quickly tried to discredit his claims with fake “fact checks” amplifying the FBI’s insistence that it “followed standard protocol.”

“No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter,” the FBI said in a statement.

In reality, nothing about the partisan raid and prosecution of Trump has been “standard,” “routine,” or precedented.

Facebook also used the FBI’s comment to run bogus fact-checks on outlets such as The Federalist and slap “missing context” labels on them for accurately reporting on and criticizing the “deadly force.”

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerry Nadler joined the dogpile on Tuesday, asking the attorney general about the deadly-force authorization during the Mar-a Lago raid, “So when former President Trump alleges that this was an assassination attempt against him, he is not telling the truth, either knowingly or, as is often the case with him, unknowingly?”

Garland agreed. “I’m just saying that the allegation is not true. This is our standard use-of-force policy, which limits the use of force that agents can use. It is used as a routine manner in searches. That was a court-authorized search, and it accompanied that package, as it routinely does,” Garland concluded.

The DOJ’s Special Counsel Jack Smith used boxes his team recovered from Trump’s home and that federal prosecutors tampered with to indict the former president and 2024 front-runner. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden, who also retained classified documents from his time as a senator and vice president, was let off scot-free by his own DOJ.

When Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan asked Garland if he regretted naming Smith as special counsel because “prosecutors aren’t supposed to tamper with evidence, and it looks like that’s what he did,” Garland claimed that was “a false characterization,” even though Smith admitted to it in court.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.