'Astounding — I was floored': Former FBI official shocked by photos of documents Trump stashed at Mar-a-Lago
On CNN Wednesday, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reacted to the explosive Justice Department filing in former President Donald Trump's lawsuit against the investigation into him, revealing for the first time a picture of large stacks of classified information that were recovered from the former president's Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida.
During an interview on CNN, McCabe broke down the significance of the FBI's findings.
"As one who has had access to these types of documents before, to see all of this laid out like this taken from Mar-a-Lago, your initial reaction?" asked anchor John Berman.
"It's astounding," said McCabe. "I was floored when I saw it for the first time last night. To see some of the nation's most highly classified secrets laid out on the ground like a stack of old newspapers, it's really remarkable. I should say that taking photographs of the items that you seized pursuant to what's described in a search warrant is like the most standard practice for the FBI, it's kind of Search Warrant 101. Agents will typically take a photograph of an item in its place before it's moved or after kind of laying it out near where it was searched with other items that are relevant, they typically put that ruler in some place in the photograph so that there is a scale for size, a measurement of whatever you're photographing ever becomes an issue. It becomes very powerful evidence later if there is a prosecution, you know, those photographs show you exactly what there was and where it was, you can see it in the place the person was holding it or securing it or hiding it. It's really startling evidence."
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"I just want to read you another part of this filing because it gets to the issue of law enforcement and how cooperative the Trump team was before this," said Berman. "'The Trump team had asserted they were fully cooperative with the FBI and the search beforehand, before the search warrant, we gave them everything they asked for, we would have given them more.' As part of this filing they say, critically, the former president's counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained. In other words, they wouldn't let us look in these boxes when we asked nicely, Andy."
"That's absolutely right, John," said McCabe. "That's the thing that jumped out to me first from this. Really straightens out some of the kinks and questions that we had in the timeline before we saw this document. The first thing that I noticed was that meeting at Mar-a-Lago which previously has been described to us by the Trump team as this wonderfully, you know, friendly interaction where the president stopped by and said hello and all this stuff. That wasn't just a friendly meeting that the two sides felt like they would get together and talk about it, that was the government coming to Mar-a-Lago to execute a subpoena, an official request, a demand for those documents."
"It sounds like when they got there they were handed one kind of thick envelope, they refer to it as a red well full of documents, and very clearly told that's it, there's nothing else, we've done a 'diligent search', to quote the document, and this is all there is left for classified," McCabe continued. "We do have some additional materials that the president took from his time in the White House, here is where we store them, you're not allowed to look at them, you're not even allowed to go in the room. And then of course, following that meeting, they developed the document says multiple sources of evidence indicating that the response to that subpoena was incomplete and documents had been taken to other places and were stored in other places. It really obliterates these claims of, oh, we've been negotiating in good faith."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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