Merrick Garland called Trump’s bluff by weighing in on the Mar-a-Lago raid and moving to unseal the warrant
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Attorney General Merrick Garland (left) and former President Donald Trump (right).Sean Rayford/Alex Wong/Getty Images
Attorney General Merrick Garland said he’d unseal the Mar-a-Lago FBI warrant.
He added that Trump’s legal team were already in possession of it.
Trump has sought to portray the raid as conducted on scant evidence.
Attorney General Merrick Garland at a press conference Thursday dealt a serious blow to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the FBI after its search of Mar-a-Lago.
Trump, his allies, and his lawyer Christina Bobb, have sought to discredit Monday’s raid, in which agents sought to establish if Trump wrongly removed material from the White House after leaving office.
The documents are said to include highly classified information, including details of US nuclear weapons.
Trump and his circle have pushed conspiracy theories that agents may have planted evidence, and have also claimed the search was conducted on the basis of thin evidence.
They called for more transparency from the Department of Justice, railing at its longstanding policy not to comment on ongoing investigations.
Then, Garland called Trump’s bluff.
In the press conference, Garland broke longstanding precedent by commenting on the raid, and announcing that the DOJ would move to unseal the warrant.
He also alluded to the fact that Trump had been in a position the whole time to release the warrant himself.
“Copies of both the warrant and the FBI property receipt were provided on the day of the search to the former president’s counsel, who was on site during the search,” Garland said, referring to Bobb.
Nonetheless, Trump went on to call for the “immediate” release of the warrant he already possesses.
If Trump’s claims are true, the warrant ought to back him up, exposing any faulty reasoning or gaps in the evidence required to justify a search.
Attorney and former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Insider in the hours before Garland’s surprise statement that the warrant would show what items the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago, and a list of statutes that may have been violated.
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Another document would describe what was taken. If the agents had found nothing to justify their intrusion, Rahmani said, this would make it clear.
There is no clear timeline for when the warrant could be made public. But, as both the DOJ and Trump have moved to release it, there is nothing standing in the way of its being published soon.
Read the original article on Business Insider