“Everything is on the table,” said a committee spokesman when asked by The Epoch Times if a subpoena and potentially an additional contempt charge against FBI Director Christopher Wray or other top [DOJ] officials could result if the documents demanded in Jordan’s June 9 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland aren’t produced. Jordan has been pressing Garland and Wray for related documents for months but has yet to get them.

The abnormalities of the Mar-a-Lago raid were described to congressional investigators during a June 7 transcribed interview with Steven D’Antuono, the FBI’s former assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office and, according to the Jordan letter, “one of the most senior FBI officials in charge of effectuating the unprecedented raid.”

“During his testimony, Mr. D’Antuono expressed strong concerns with the department’s pursuit of the raid and noted several unusual features in the department’s handling of the case,” Jordan told Garland. “Mr. D’Antuono, who had over two decades of FBI experience, noted his frustration that the FBI was going to be ‘left holding the bag again’ with respect to the search of President Trump’s residence.

“During his transcribed interview, Mr. D’Antuono detailed how he disagreed with the Justice Department’s approach to the raid and described several abnormalities about the Department’s actions in pursuing its investigation of President Trump.”

Among the abnormalities described by D’Antuono was the fact the Mar-a-Lago action was carried out by the FBI’s Washington Field Office, not the Miami Field Office, which would normally be assigned because of the Mar-a-Lago location.

D’Anuono, according to Jordan, told the committee that “FBI headquarters made the decision to assign the execution of the search warrant to the Washington Field Office (WFO) despite the location of the search occurring in the territory of the FBI’s Miami Field Office. Mr. D’Antuono stated that he had ‘absolutely no idea’ why this decision was made and questioned why the Miami Field Office was not taking the lead on this matter.”

D’Antuono pointed out to the committee that bureau officials told special counsel John Durham that field offices, not FBI headquarters, should run investigations.

Another abnormality was the fact no U.S. Attorney was assigned to the case even though that was standard FBI operating procedure.

“He explained that he ‘didn’t understand why there wasn’t a U.S. Attorney assigned’ and ‘raised this concern a lot with’ department officials because this was out of the ordinary,” Jordan told Garland. “Mr. D’Antuono indicated that he ‘never got a good answer’ and was told that the National Security Division would be handling this matter.”

D’Antuono said Jay Bratt, who leads the DOJ’s counterintelligence division, functioned as the lead prosecutor on the case. Jordan noted in his letter that “Mr. Bratt is the same department lawyer who allegedly improperly pressured a lawyer representing an employee of President Trump.” He was referring to an allegation by a former Trump lawyer that Bratt was pushing another Trump attorney to become a witness against the former president.

Multiple ‘Abnormalities’ in FBI Raid

A third abnormality alleged by D’Antuono was the fact FBI line agents opposed the use of a search warrant to force entry to Mar-a-Lago, and preferred that government officials obtain prior consent from Trump before entering the premises. Jordan told Garland that D’Antuono “indicated a belief that either you or Director Christopher Wray made the decision to seek a search warrant, despite opposition from the line agents working this case in the WFO.”

A fourth abnormality was related to the third, that the FBI agents at Mar-a-Lago did not wait for the presence of a Trump lawyer before entering the former president’s residence. “Mr. D’Antuono testified that the FBI sought to exclude President Trump’s attorney from the search, a move with which Mr. D’Antuono disagreed,” Jordan told Garland.

As a result of D’Antuono’s testimony, Jordan told Garland he wants “all documents and communications referring or relating to meetings between FBI and Justice Department officials prior to the execution of the search warrant on President Trump’s private residence, all documents and communications referring or relating to the execution of a search warrant on President Trump’s private residence, including those sent or received by the following FBI and Justice Department Officials, and all documents and communications between or among Washington Field Office agents and employees and the U.S. Secret Service about a potential search of President Trump’s residence.”

Wray barely averted a possible congressional contempt citation earlier this week when he agreed to allow members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability to view an unclassified FBI document describing an informant’s description of evidence that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter accepted bribes from a Ukrainian energy executive while Biden was vice-president.

The Epoch Times has requested comment from DOJ but none was received by publication time.

Article by Mark Tapscott from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

The Heritage litigation stems from the conservative non-profit foundation’s April 18 FOIA request to DHS for all agency documents in which appear the terms “Babel X,” “Babel,” “Babel Street” or “PanAmerica.”

Babel X is a controversial software program that allows users to monitor social media posts around the world in 200 languages, as well as listen to smart phone conversations in a specified geographic location.

The FOIA also requested copies of all DHS emails in which appears the term “@babelstreet.com” addressed to or from a lengthy list of agency officials, including Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, John D. Cohen, DHS’s Acting Under Secretary and Chief Intelligence Officer, and 11 other officials in the agency’s Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) operation.

Finally, the FOIA sought all communications “regarding the procurement, award and implementation of the award to PANAMERICA COMPUTERS, INC. regarding award 70T02021F7554N002.”

The FOIA request was submitted, according to the complaint, because “Heritage understands DHS uses Babel X to monitor unknown entities, groups, and individuals in a manner similar to that of the FBI.” The FBI spent $5 million earlier this year to buy 5,000 user permits for Babel X from PANAMERICA COMPUTERS, INC., with an option for further purchases up to $27 million.

The maker of Babel X claims, according to the Heritage suit that the powerful scraping software is capable of multiple avenues of digital surveillance, including “persistent cross-lingual search and discovery across multiple data sources with advanced statistical and crowd-sourcing techniques,” deciphering “relevant insights across 200+ languages with state-of-the-art, linguistics technology,” performing “sentiment analysis in 50+ major world languages,” filtering “by a wide range of variables including keywords, hashtags, language, authors, emojis, dates/times, regular expression,” conducting “ad-hoc research for in-depth insight on entities,” analyzing “themes, entities, and categories as well as detect relationships,” and “integrating all available data on a single platform.”

The complaint added that “DHS has purchased and continues to purchase a large number of Babel X products and uses those products for a variety of functions.”

The Heritage complaint said the FBI contract indicates that “the FBI solicited for a product that was able to gather and analyze information from the dark web and a number of common applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.

“The FBI expects to run 20,000 discrete keyword searches a month through the collected data. The FBI contracting documents stated that the FBI’s ‘intent’ was to look at past events, but that ‘predictive analytics’ that would allow the FBI to ‘point to possible actions of a subject or group’ were ‘desirable.’”

The software’s maker told The Washington Post that the product does not listen to cell phone calls, according to the complaint.

In response to the Heritage FOIA, DHS officials acknowledged receiving it but then asked the foundation to narrow its request because its initial review indicated that a huge number of responsive documents were potentially involved.

After further delays, the complaint said the litigation was necessary because DHS “has failed to promptly review agency records for the purpose of locating and collecting those records that are responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request.”

In addition, DHS is “wrongfully withholding non-exempt records requested by Heritage by failing to produce any records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request,” and is further “wrongfully withholding non-exempt-agency records requested by Plaintiffs by failing to segregate exempt information in otherwise non-exempt records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request.”

The suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, asks that DHS be ordered to conduct another search for all relevant records, as well as to “produce, within 20 days of the Court’s order, or by such other date as the Court deems appropriate, any and all non-exempt records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request and indexes justifying the withholding of any responsive records withheld in whole or in part under claim of exemption.”

A spokesman for DHS could not be reached for comment in time for publication of this news story.

Joining Heritage as a plaintiff in the litigation is Heritage Senior Adviser Mike Howell, who manages the foundation’s oversight project. Howell joined Heritage in 2018 after serving at DHS in the General Counsel’s office, where he was “the chief legal point of contact for the department’s 3,000-lawyer office for all congressional oversight and investigations that concerned any of the department’s headquarters or component offices,” according to the foundation.

Before going to DHS, Howell worked on Capitol Hill from 2013 to 2017 as an attorney for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

The present FOIA lawsuit is only the second one ever filed by the nonprofit since its founding in 1973.