FLASHBACK: FBI mistakenly raids wrong house before finding Mar-a-Lago
Former President Donald Trump says he plans to sue the US Justice Department and FBI regarding the Bureau’s 2022 raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate in search of classified documents. Two years ago this month, Battle Line covered the raid and the follies and destruction that followed. Originally published August 30, 2022.
On the morning of August 8th, FBI agents stealthily descended on what they thought was former President Trump’s posh Mar-a-Lago compound. Agents were there to seize what they believed were classified documents that Trump had wrongly – perhaps illegally – taken from the White House at the end of his presidency. They carefully tiptoed to the door, ready to return boxes and boxes of important materials to its rightful owner: The United States government.
With guns in hand, they kicked down the door and yelled, “FBI!” One agent held up his badge to a man standing inside the house. After realizing it was just his own reflection in the mirror – and that he was holding his badge upside-down – he quickly eased his posture and tried to act cool. A speedy scan of the premises confirmed no one was home, so they would be able to conduct their search without interference.
Before long, an agent nervously yelled from the kitchen, “Guys, you’re not going to believe this.” The other agents scampered into the room, two of them simultaneously getting stuck in the threshold of the door. “What is it, boss?” one agent asked.
“Shit! Shit! Shit! This isn’t good,” said lead agent Walter Visconti. “There’s no way Trump would own those.”
They were staring at the kitchen counter, on which rested a large bowl of oranges, apples, peaches and a few kiwis. Next to the bowl was an assortment of zucchini, squash, onions, sweet potatoes and a giant cantaloupe. Right then, the agents realized that they had made a huge mistake. Donald Trump, they well knew, would never have so many healthy foods in his home, especially not at one time.
The house they had infiltrated was not Mar-a-Lago. It was a cozy, single-level home on Wenonah Place in West Palm Beach, Florida, more than a mile away from where they were supposed to be. They darted back to the front entrance and propped up the now-unhinged door against the frame, hoping the owner wouldn’t notice.
That owner is 81-year-old Shirley Clark, who returned home 45 minutes later after a morning of tea and cookies at a friend’s house a few blocks away. “Thank God mom wasn’t home when those goons barged in,” said her daughter, Miranda. “They would have given her a damn heart attack. My mother deserves an explanation and an apology. Not to mention a new front door.”
Battle Line left three voicemails with the FBI, but none were returned. Instead, the Bureau issued the following written statement:
“We regret our mistake and apologize for our mishandling of this situation. We were so focused on raiding President Trump’s home and saving the republic that we failed to realize we had typed the wrong address into Google Maps. Funny how that happens sometimes, isn’t it? Just goes to show that these things can happen to anybody. Even the FBI. But we are not here to make excuses. What we did was wrong, and we hope Ms. Clark and the American people can find it in their hearts to forgive us.”
The apology may have sufficed except for one small detail.
As some had predicted, during the Mar-a-Lago raid, the FBI did in fact find documents listing the country’s highly classified nuclear codes. But because the agents had not kept detailed inventory of every container they had seized, they could not prove whether the nuclear codes were taken from Mar-a-Lago or from the small home on Wenonah Place.
“There’s no way this will hold up in court,” said Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional law professor at Yale University.
“Well, that’s preposterous,” Visconti, the lead agent, fired back. “Of course the nuclear codes came from Mar-a-Lago. We didn’t take anything from the home on Wenonah Place.” Visconti’s statement was disproved after private investigators found a large cantaloupe in the backseat of the FBI’s Chevy Tahoe.
Visconti returned to Ms. Clark’s house the following day in an attempt to smooth things over. He knocked on the door, which crashed onto the foyer’s tile floor, as it had not yet been fixed. The thunderous noise frightened Ms. Clark so badly that she suffered a severe heart attack.
She remains in critical condition.
