Details on the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago are starting to fall into place. According to a senior Justice Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, a confidential source not only told the Bureau which classified documents Donald Trump was allegedly still hiding, but exactly where the former president was keeping them. With that information in play, plans were made to search Mar-a-Lago while Trump was gone to avoid a political circus. Obviously, that did not work out.
Via Newsweek:
The effort to keep the raid low-key failed: instead, it prompted a furious response from GOP leaders and Trump supporters. “What a spectacular backfire,” says the Justice official.
“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 says. “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.”
According to additional sources, plans for the search were made weeks ago and had no political motive. The FBI’s goal was “recovering highly classified documents that were illegally removed from the White House.” However, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about it, so there’s no way any of this was going to happen quietly.
“They were seeking to avoid any media circus,” a senior intelligence official told 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.”
(Via Newsweek)