Discovery and the 1977 raids

In June 1976 an IRS librarian observed Wolfe making unauthorized copies of internal documents at the agency's Washington headquarters. Wolfe presented Coast Guard credentials he had previously obtained through Meisner; the librarian recognized the credentials as not standard for IRS visitors and reported the incident. The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an inquiry. Wolfe and Meisner were both summoned before a grand jury in the months that followed.

Meisner subsequently absented himself from the federal proceedings with Guardian Office assistance. From May 1976 he was, according to the later court documents, kept in Los Angeles under Guardian Office personnel supervision in conditions that the prosecution characterized as effective custody. He left that arrangement on June 20, 1977, and contacted the FBI, providing a substantial body of information about the operation.

On the basis of Meisner's account and other evidence developed by the FBI, search warrants were obtained for two Church offices: the Cedars complex in Los Angeles and the Founding Church premises in Washington, D.C. The warrants were executed simultaneously on the morning of July 8, 1977, by a combined force of approximately 134 agents. The searches lasted around twenty-one hours. Approximately 48,000 pages of documents were seized.

The documents included Guardian Office operational files, the Guardian Orders themselves, internal correspondence, and operational logs. The breadth of what the raids produced was the principal reason the subsequent prosecution had the documentary base it did. Subsequent motions by Church counsel to have the seized documents suppressed under the Fourth Amendment were unsuccessful at both the trial-court and appellate levels; the documents remained admissible and became part of the public record of the case.