Reverberations over the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago will escalate this week as Donald Trump challenges the Justice Department in court and US intelligence agencies assess whether his retention of classified documents harmed national security.
Reverberations over the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago will escalate this week as Donald Trump challenges the Justice Department in court and US intelligence agencies assess whether his retention of classified documents harmed national security.
Republicans are, meanwhile, demanding more transparency over the unprecedented search of an ex-president’s home, seizing on a heavily redacted affidavit unsealed on Friday to raise suspicions of a politically motivated hit.
Uproar over the search three weeks ago has thrust Trump, who has teased a 2024 campaign, back into the center of a midterm election cycle already rocked by the Supreme Court’s overturning of the right to an abortion — one factor that has given Democrats new hope of staving off a Republican red wave in November.
While President Joe Biden has avoided expansive comment over his predecessor’s legal situation or the investigation, he is now trying to make the midterms a choice between himself and Trumpism, instead of a referendum on his own performance. The President blasted the ex-President’s “Make America Great Again” philosophy last week as “semi-facism” in comments that raised the political heat ahead of a hugely consequential fall.
The redacted affidavit showed that 184 documents bearing classification markings were retrieved from Trump’s Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago in January. This is in addition to 11 sets of documents, some bearing the designation “top secret/SCI” — one of the highest levels of classification — taken by the FBI after the search of the property earlier this month. The affidavit, which was used to convince a judge of probable cause that a crime had been committed, also showed the bureau expected to find evidence of obstruction. Large sections of the document were blacked out to protect FBI agents, witnesses and the future prospects of the investigation.
The affidavit and other legal documents show evidence of a long-term effort, well before the August 8 FBI search, by the Department of Justice to get back documents that Trump had taken from the White House and that should have been in the National Archives.
But Republicans have capitalized on the multiple redactions that cloaked the full reasons for the subsequent FBI warrant and search, to fuel the sense of uncertainty and to accuse the bureau and Attorney General Merrick Garland of overreaching.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday that the DOJ should give Americans more information about the kind of secret documents that were at Trump’s residence and why they felt compelled to take the politically explosive step of mounting a search.
“My biggest criticism, and I think the concern of most of the country, is, where’s the transparency, right?” the GOP governor said. “If you’re going to take unprecedented action and raid a former president’s house, well, you better have a strategy for unprecedented transparency,” added Sununu, who’s running for reelection this fall.
“You got to be able to show your cards when you’re taking actions like this.”
The criticism of the department by Sununu was significant and may reflect broader Republican opinion because he hasn’t shirked from criticizing Trump in the past.
