Trump faces investigations, lawsuits as he weighs White House run

As Donald Trump considers whether to make a third run for the White House — and when to announce that decision — the former president faces a raft of official investigations and civil lawsuits.

Several of those probes put Trump at risk of criminal sanctions. Others threaten his pocketbook.

What also remains to be seen is whether they will hurt or help Trump, in what many supporters expect and hope will be his candidacy in 2024.

The Republican Trump has repeatedly called the legal probes “witch hunts” by Democratic officials and allies that are designed to hobble him politically. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Here are the top legal challenges for Trump at the moment.

The records probe on Monday vaulted to being potentially the biggest legal threat to Trump, after his stunning revelation that a team of FBI agents was raiding his residence at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

The raid was connected to a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., which is investigating Trump over the removal of records from the White House when he left office in January 2021.

The National Archives and Records Administration in January 2022 retrieved 15 boxes of White House records from Mar-a-Lago. That government agency said the documents should have been sent to NARA at the end of Trump’s administration.

A month later, the National Archives revealed it had found documents marked as being “classified national security information” in the boxes. The Justice Department in May issued a subpoena for those documents to the National Archives.

On Monday, FBI agents carrying a search warrant went to Mar-a-Lago and seized about a dozen boxes from the residence, according to an attorney for Trump, who was staying in the New York area at the time. That lawyer, Christina Bobb, said agents were investigating possible violations of laws related to the Presidential Records Act and the handling of classified material.

The Justice Department on Thursday filed a motion to unseal the search warrant that the FBI used to raid Trump’s home.

To obtain such a warrant, the FBI has to show a judge that there is probable cause that a crime has been committed and that the evidence they are searching for relates to that potential crime.

“Monday’s unprecedented and absolutely unnecessary raid of President Trump’s home was only the latest and most egregious action of hostility by the Biden Administration, whose Justice Department has been weaponized to harass President Trump, his supporters, and staff,” Trump’s spokesperson told NBC News on Thursday.