Two Americans are alleging the FBI lost or stole their property after seizing it through a “shady” process.

“All we know is that their property was in a box and safe before the FBI broke into the box,” Joe Gay, an attorney with the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice, told Fox News. “Once the FBI broke into the box, we honestly don’t know exactly what happened.”

“We don’t know if they lost it. We don’t know if somebody pocketed it and walked away,” he continued. “We have no way to know.”

The Institute for Justice filed two lawsuits Friday on behalf of clients who had property seized from their safety deposit boxes in a March 2021 FBI raid on U.S. Private Vaults, a Beverly Hills–based company.

[Bob Menendez to cite this case in 3, 2, 1 … I wrote about this case a year ago, and it is very suspicious. However, the FBI didn’t raid a bank, but a private safe-deposit box company. If they lost the property of the owners, that should raise a number of red flags about this operation even apart from the earlier red flags. — Ed]