House Republicans call for releasing Mar-a-Lago raid affidavit
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee on Sunday said the affidavit authorizing the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home should be released in the interest of transparency — as a GOP colleague said the search warrants heightened scrutiny.
Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence panel, said the court document would provide information “to understand how did the FBI justify raiding Mar-a-Lago.”
“Certainly, the American public wants to make certain this is not an abuse of discretion,” Turner said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Illinois, meanwhile, said the execution of the search warrant Aug. 8 on Trump’s members-only resort in Palm Beach “is a very unprecedented measure” that needs to be looked at more closely.
“When you’re going after an ex-president who may run again — this is automatically political,” Crenshaw said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“You cannot separate the legal aspects of this from the political aspects of it. You can’t. And it doesn’t seem to me like they have acted responsibly as a result of that,” he continued, adding that the FBI should have just asked Trump if there were classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Crenshaw went on to say that nobody believes Trump was “reading nuclear secrets on his bedside at night,” but said if the Justice Department is going to raise violations of the Espionage Act and pursue a criminal investigation “you have to prove intent.”
“And so that’s why a lot of us jumped to the conclusion that this was highly politicized, because it was so unnecessary to do an armed raid to resolve this particular issue that could have been resolved very easily otherwise,” Crenshaw said.
Turner said the affidavit will provide insight on what the FBI told the court it was looking for in Trump’s winter home, and noted, “they had other options besides just raiding the house.”
“What is it that was at an imminent national security threat that you didn’t just go to court and ask the court to order that the documents be delivered to them?” he said on “Face the Nation.”
The congressman said there have been previous examples of the FBI overstepping its bounds, especially when it comes to investigating Trump.
“We had an attorney for the FBI that actually was convicted of doctoring an email to obtain a warrant against Trump. There’s Trump’s organization – you have the FBI using the Russia dossier, which has been proven to be debunked as evidence under a warrant that they submitted,” he said.
US Magistrate Bruce Reinhart, who signed off on the search warrant, said last week that he believed part of the affidavit could be released and gave the Justice Department until Aug. 25 to submit a list of material that could be redacted so that the document could be made public.
The Justice Department opposes releasing the affidavit because it would “provide a roadmap to the investigation” and would compromise witnesses and secret grand jury testimony.
“This is a volatile situation with respect to this search across the political spectrum — but on one side in particular,” Justice Department counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt told the judge. “The government is very concerned about the safety of the witnesses in these cases and the impact of all the attention on these witnesses on other witnesses.”
Trump in postings on his Truth Social media site has called for the material to be released but his legal team did not take part in oral arguments at the court hearing.
Federal agents seized 27 boxes from Trump’s estate, including 11 sets of classified documents that were labeled top secret, secret, or confidential, according to an inventory list made public by Reinhart on Aug. 12.
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