More information has come out about the FBI's raid on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. Newsweek reports that the raid "was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents." Newsweek says its report comes from two senior government officials "who have direct knowledge of the FBI's deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters."
Shockingly, the FBI thought this matter could be kept low-profile, per
Newsweek:
FBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Justice Department official who is a 30-year veteran of the FBI.
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."
