We Finally Know Something the Unhinged FBI Went Looking for at Mar-a-Lago: Report
In a brief statement at the Department of Justice on Thursday afternoon, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he had personally signed off on the FBI’s request to seek a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate.
He also revealed the DOJ had filed a court motion to unseal the search warrant that had authorized the raid along with the list of items agents had removed from the residence.
In a statement posted late Thursday night on Truth Social, his social media site, Trump said he would not oppose the DOJ’s motion, according to multiple media reports.
In fact, according to The Wall Street Journal, Trump encouraged the warrant’s “immediate release.” He said his attorneys had been “cooperating fully” and noted, “The government could have had whatever they wanted, if we had it.”
USA Today reported Trump referred to Monday’s unprecedented action as an “un-American, unwarranted and unnecessary raid and break-in of my home.” He closed with a demand to “Release the documents now!”
“People familiar with the investigation” told The Washington Post on Thursday the reason for the FBI’s urgency was they’d received a tip that documents related to nuclear weapons were being stored at Mar-a-Lago.
The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity and did not provide any details about the information the FBI was seeking, if the relevant material been recovered, or which nation’s nuclear weapons the documents allegedly concerned, the report said.
David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section, told the Post: “If this [allegation] is true, it would suggest that material residing unlawfully at Mar-a-Lago may have been classified at the highest classification level. If the FBI and the Department of Justice believed there were top secret materials still at Mar-a-Lago, that would lend itself to greater ‘hair-on-fire’ motivation to recover that material as quickly as possible.”
Color me skeptical. We’ve been down this road before with the DOJ and the FBI. These are the same folks who brought us the Trump-Russian collusion hoax.
This raid occurred even though Trump’s lawyers had been fully cooperating with attorneys for the National Archives and Records Administration on the return of the documents.
Fox Business News’ Elizabeth MacDonald spoke to former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy on Thursday evening (before The Washington Post report was published). In the segment below, MacDonald noted the Trump team’s cooperation and asked, “So, why do a raid with a battalion of 30 agents with machine guns over a record violation?”
McCarthy replied, “Because it’s not over a records violation.”
McCarthy said that despite Garland’s remarks earlier in the day, he believes the FBI is trying to uncover documents related to the Jan. 6 investigation against Trump.
“My own view is that this is related to Jan. 6,” he told MacDonald. “The fact that they had a basis to seek a search warrant on classified documents gave them a legitimate reason to get a warrant under the law.”
It is telling that McCarthy, who once worked at the DOJ, didn’t believe Garland. The outrage that has spread throughout America over Monday’s strong-man tactics is a sign that he wasn’t alone in that view.
If the FBI finds evidence of another crime while combing through the documents retrieved from Trump’s home, it can be used against him, assuming the courts hold the search to have been legitimate in the first place.
The politicization of the DOJ and the FBI began in the Obama administration and has continued to this day.
It picked up pace once candidate Donald Trump appeared on the scene in June 2015 and has reached the point where many Americans no longer trust these once highly-revered institutions.
Shortly after news of the raid broke on Monday night, in an appearance on Fox News, an incensed Dan Bongino called it some “third-world bulls***.”
It’s hard to argue.
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