No portion of the heavily redacted search warrant affidavit supported the Biden administration taking the unprecedented step of raiding a former president’s home, according to a former top intelligence official.
“I think it provided a general recitation of the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice believed that there were classified documents at Mar-a-Lago,” John Ratcliffe, a director of national intelligence during the Trump administration, said during an Aug. 26 interview with CBS News. “But I didn’t really see anything in the affidavit that justified what still seems like an extreme approach by the FBI and the Department of Justice to retrieve those documents if, in fact, they were classified.”
Officials said they had reason to believe that Trump violated federal laws, including laws that bar destroying, falsifying, or altering certain records and transmitting or losing defense information.
The core discovery driving the investigation, according to the unredacted portions of the affidavit, was the identification of classified information in 15 boxes transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration from Mar-a-Lago earlier this year.
FBI agents reviewed the materials themselves in May and had reason to believe more such documents were still stored at Mar-a-Lago, according to the court document.
“There’s nothing in there that’s really going to tamp down the tensions that are running so high in this country with the American people about whether or not this is justified,” Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman, told CBS. “If you set out to deepen divisions between Americans and to increase a level of skepticism or distrust of the FBI and the Department of Justice, then they succeeded.”
Richard Grenell, who was the acting director of national intelligence before Ratcliffe was confirmed by the Senate, said there were too many redactions in the copy of the affidavit that was made public.
“This is way too much redaction. Revealing a source or a method is the only reason to redact. This is done by redacting words, not paragraphs,” he said. “Intel agencies have created a crisis of confidence.
“This is completely political and the American people see it.”
Stephen Miller, who was a senior adviser to the president during the Trump administration, also was among the additional former administration officials offering criticism after the affidavit was released.
“The idea, spelled out in the affidavit, that the Archives sicced the FBI on President Trump—on the premise that unelected bureaucrats, not POTUS, had final authority on national security—can only be construed as an attempt to overthrow our entire democratic constitutional order,” he wrote in a social media post.
Still, some other former officials disagreed.
Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor, said the affidavit indicated to him that the Department of Justice “seems to have acted quickly” after FBI agents reviewed the documents from Mar-a-Lago.
“The department actually looks pretty darn good here in terms of what they were doing,” Weissman, who has donated to onetime Trump rival Hillary Clinton in the past, said on National Public Radio.
“You can understand why they acted so quickly because ... not only were there 184 classified documents, but there were 25 documents that were at the very highest level of classification,” he added. “And that, of course, could raise a ton of red flags as to whether the department believed there were still documents that could be just as confidential still at Mar-a-Lago.”
