Former President Donald Trump is planning to sue the Department of Justice (DOJ) for $100 million in damages over their 2022 raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate, claiming it resulted from acts “rooted in malicious prosecution.”
Trump’s legal team, led by Daniel Epstein, has filed a notice to sue the DOJ, Fox Business reports, citing a copy of the filing and interviews with Epstein. The filing gives the department 180 days from the day it is received to respond and resolve the matter; if that timeframe goes by without a deal, Trump’s case will move to federal court in the Southern District of Florida.
Trump is the Republican nominee for president. Should he win re-election to the oval office in November — and become the second president to serve non-consecutive terms — he could end up suing his own department. That 180-day period would end in early February, a handful of weeks after Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025.
In August 2022, federal agents searched Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate and seized 33 groups of items, including 18 documents marked as top secret and 31 marked as confidential. Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 37 felony counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving office after repeated refusals to return them.
Those counts were dismissed last month by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled that the special prosecutor that brought those charges — Jack Smith — was unconstitutionally appointed. Cannon, who was nominated to her post by Trump, noted that her ruling does not apply to other jurisdictions.
Trump’s legal team argues that the decisions made by federal officials, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, were a “clear intent to engage in political persecution – not to advance good law enforcement practices” and were not grounded in social, economic, or political policies. They claim the federal government invaded Trump’s privacy and engaged in “malicious prosecution.”