A newly surfaced memo reveals that a senior Biden DOJ official raised serious red flags about the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago before the ink was even dry on the search warrant — and Merrick Garland's department plowed ahead anyway. Patty Stemler, a 30-year DOJ veteran and former chief of the Criminal Appellate Section, fired off an email just two days after the August 8, 2022 raid warning that the entire legal theory was shaky. They knew. They just didn't care.
Nothing says "blind pursuit of justice" like ignoring your own senior counsel when she tells you the case has problems. Really inspires confidence in our institutions.
Stemler, who first arrived at the DOJ in 1976 and ran the appellate section starting in 1992, wasn't some low-level staffer shooting off opinions from the mailroom. She was the department's top criminal appellate attorney for three decades — a career so distinguished she received the 56th Annual Justice Tom C. Clark Award from the Federal Bar Association in 2023. When Patty Stemler tells you there's a problem, you listen. Unless you're Merrick Garland and you've got a political mission to complete.
In her August 10, 2022 email, obtained by Just the News reporters John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy, Stemler laid it out plainly: "Doesn't Trump maintain that he had the authority to declassify documents while he was still President?" She pressed further: "Has anyone in NSD or OLC looked at that?"
That's the National Security Division and the Office of Legal Counsel — the two offices that should have resolved the declassification question before anyone drove a convoy of FBI vehicles to Palm Beach. But apparently, asking basic legal questions wasn't on the pre-raid checklist.
Stemler didn't stop there. "I didn't know about this search in advance, but I have been worrying about it ever since," she wrote. "I don't know if we intend to charge anyone with respect to the classified documents seized yesterday."
Read that again. A senior DOJ official — two days after the most politically explosive law enforcement action in modern American history — didn't even know if they planned to charge anyone. They raided a former president's home, went through Melania Trump's underwear drawers, and their own appellate chief wasn't even sure what the endgame was.
The declassification argument wasn't some fringe theory cooked up on Truth Social. Trump's office stated in August 2022 that "the very fact that these documents were present at Mar-a-Lago means they couldn't have been classified," noting that Trump "had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office were deemed declassified." Kash Patel, now FBI Director, backed this up as early as May 2022, telling Breitbart that "Trump declassified whole sets of materials" he believed "the American public should have."
Trump himself said it plainly on Truth Social: "Number one, it was all declassified." He later told a CNN town hall in May 2023: "I had every right to under the Presidential Records Act."
Meanwhile, the DOJ's own legal infrastructure was flashing warning lights. Stemler specifically asked whether the NSD or OLC had examined Trump's declassification authority. The answer, based on what followed, appears to be: who cares, we've got a narrative to build.
Special Counsel Jack Smith charged ahead regardless, building a case that ultimately collapsed. Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case in July 2024. Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed the January 6 case in November 2024. Smith released his final report in January 2025 and slithered off into the sunset.
And now we learn that even inside the building, even among career officials who'd spent decades serving under presidents of both parties, there were people raising their hands saying, "Hold on — have we actually thought this through?"
The answer was no. They hadn't. Because the raid on Mar-a-Lago was never about classified documents or national security. It was about stopping Donald Trump. Stemler's memo is just the latest receipt proving what we all knew from day one — they weaponized the DOJ, their own people told them it was wrong, and they did it anyway.