Lil Durk‘s lawyers want two contested phones thrown out of his federal murder-for-hire case, and the backstory of how those phones ended up in government hands is wild.

It goes back to July 11, 2021, when armed intruders broke into Durk’s gated mansion in Braselton, Georgia, at around 5 A.M. Durk and his then-fiancée India Royale were both home, with their toddler daughter inside.

According to body cam footage that resurfaced earlier this year, India fired at the intruders first, and Durk grabbed her gun after she dropped it. The crew fled without hurting anyone.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation responded and obtained a search warrant to collect evidence from the scene.

The problem, according to the motion filed today, is that the warrant only covered electronics belonging to the intruders. Durk was the victim. His phones had nothing to do with what that warrant authorized, but agents grabbed them anyway and never returned them.

The GBI then got a second warrant in August 2021 to actually search those phones.

Durk’s team says that warrant is also garbage. Its stated purpose was to determine who might want to harm Durk, citing his gang affiliations and fame.

His attorneys argue there’s no legal basis for that reasoning. You can’t search someone’s private property to protect them from future crimes. That’s not how the Fourth Amendment works.

Here’s where it gets worse for the government.

Even if that second warrant were valid, the law requires agents to give back or destroy any data that falls outside the scope of the search once they’re done sorting through it. The GBI held Durk’s full phone data for five years without doing any of that.

They eventually handed everything over to the FBI, which didn’t get its own warrant to search the phones until July 8 of this year, six weeks before Durk’s August 20 trial. Federal courts have found Fourth Amendment violations for warrant delays as short as 23 days.

The defense is asking Judge Michael Fitzgerald to suppress everything that came off those phones, including a text the government has labeled as a key trial exhibit.

They’re also arguing the phone evidence was disclosed so late that the court should exclude it on fairness grounds alone, since Durk’s team had no way to properly challenge it before trial.

This motion drops just two weeks after Durk’s biggest pretrial win.

Judge Fitzgerald granted his team’s request to separate newly added racketeering charges from the August trial, calling the government’s move a “very clever attempt” to sneak a Chicago killing into a Los Angeles courtroom.

Those charges will be handled in a separate trial down the line.

Durk has been locked up since October 2024, when the FBI caught him boarding a private jet in Florida after his co-defendants were arrested.

He’s charged with orchestrating a hit on rapper Quando Rondo in retaliation for the 2020 death of King Von. The attack missed Rondo but killed his cousin Lul Pab at a Beverly Hills gas station in August 2022.

Durk has pleaded not guilty to all counts.