Two anonymous senior government sources have revealed that the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday was based on a tip from a confidential informant who informed Federal Agents where to find government documents alleged to be in Trump’s possession, according to a news report.
The Biden administration officials, described as having first-hand knowledge of the FBI’s decision-making process, said the raid was intentionally performed while the former president was away from Mar-a-Lago, according to Newsweek.
According to Newsweek, the FBI’s top brass in Washington and the regional field office in Miami, Florida, “were focused on the former president’s scheduled return to Florida from his residences in New York and New Jersey.”
“They were seeking to avoid any media circus,” said an unnamed senior intelligence official, according to Newsweek. “So even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout.”
Trump is widely known to summer at his Bedminster, New Jersey, property. A New York Times report from 2017 noted that the Trump National Club in the Garden State was sometimes referred to as the “Summer White House.”
According to the Newsweek report, the FBI in Miami and Washington made the decision to time the raid in Trump’s absence to prevent Trump from using the actions as a photo-op or attempting to interfere with their search.
The bureau’s plans to conduct an operation under the radar failed however and instead provoked a massive response from Republican lawmakers and Trump voters alike.
“What a spectacular backfire,” one Justice official reportedly told Newsweek.
“I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action,” the official said.
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“They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite.”
On Monday at about 9 a.m. Eastern time, armed with a signed, sealed warrant from Judge Bruce Reinhard of the U.S. District Court’s Southern Florida District, approximately two dozen federal agents and technicians arrived at the Mar-a-Lago club and entered the former president’s private residence on the grounds.
Christina Bobb, a Trump attorney told Real America’s Voice that the FBI agents on site did not allow her to observe the search.
President Donald Trump’s attorney @Christina_Bobb tells @SteveGruberShow: The FBI claimed to be looking for Presidential records and classified information. The irony is that President Trump was free unclassify documents at his leisure while in office. pic.twitter.com/G1G0rsexog
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) August 10, 2022
Bobb told host Steve Gruber that she arrived at about 10 a.m. and that FBI agents didn’t leave the property until “about 6:30- 7 o’clock at night, so it was maybe a 10-hour day for them.”
When asked about the FBI’s refusal to allow her to observe she explained, “Well, I was told that under Florida law, or you know, whatever law they were following, that I do not have the right to watch their investigation. So I had to stand aside.”
“And I mean, I could see them coming and going and, you know, kind of figure out what they were doing and what areas they were searching. And every once in a while I would try to get an update. But as far as like actually watching where they were searching and looking into, you know, the storage facility and all of that, I was not allowed to watch that.”
Gruber asked Bobb if she had been allowed to see the search warrant. Bobb said that after she arrived at the scene and announced herself as legal representation for President Trump and asked to see the warrant, she was at first refused by the FBI.
She told Gruber, “initially they refused and said you know, ‘we don’t have to show it to you,’ and there was a little bit of an exchange about whether it was appropriate to withhold the warrant when you’re searching the residence of a former president who’s likely to be a nominee in the next election.”
Bobb described the warrant as “very, I would say, thin” and said the supporting documentation of “probable cause” was sealed by the court.
“We don’t know what the probable cause is, why they were allowed to search, but they did,” she said.
She said she was told the agents were searching for material that should not have been on the property under the Presidential Records Act as well as “classified information that they think should not have been removed from the White House.”
“I don’t believe there was any down there,” she said, referring to classified material. “We had done a search of it before and didn’t find anything noteworthy.
“Yet, I’m sure that they’re claiming that there was something, you know, terribly egregious, that’s a grave matter of national security,” she said, with obvious sarcasm. “But we’ll find out.”
