Court filings in President Trump’s classified documents case just revealed more shocking insights into the August 2022 FBI raid at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The FBI turned off all the CCTV servers to ensure no recordings of the raid took place - supposedly out of concern for the agents’ safety.
While raiding Trump’s house, the FBI said that Trump could keep the cameras going so they could watch the agents - but they couldn’t record the FBI’s search. Only after Trump’s attorneys demanded the cameras be turned back on did the FBI comply.
The FBI clearly abused its authority, acting like it was normal practice to turn off cameras during a raid. And unfortunately, for a period of time, in an age where bodycams are ubiquitous, we have no idea what the FBI was doing at Trump’s home.
You would expect the Department of Justice to want more transparency if it truly wanted to preserve the integrity of the agency. Instead, quite the opposite happened, as if they didn’t want a record of what they were actually doing. It certainly raises more questions about the FBI’s tactics for gathering evidence.
The controversy over Smith’s case against Trump continues to snowball. Yesterday the hearing to determine whether Special Counsel Jack Smith was lawfully appointed to serve in his role continued. I expect a decision on this hearing relatively soon.
And don’t forget that Smith also admitted to mishandling Trump’s documents, possibly even tampering with the evidence to such a degree that Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan (OH-4) launched an investigation.
We fully expect Trump’s attorneys to argue that Trump’s due process rights were violated. ACLJ Senior Counsel and Director of Policy Harry Hutchison expounded further:
“The Trump defense is on sound grounds in asserting Trump’s constitutional rights grounded in the Fourth Amendment. So the quintessential question is whether Trump’s due process rights were violated during the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid. And second, was the search warrant . . . a misleading search warrant? . . . Based on the publicly available information . . . Trump’s defense can logically make the claim that the evidence obtained during the search warrant should be thrown out due to unconstitutionality. Because the warrant lacked . . . particularity as required by the Fourth Amendment, . . . [which] protects every person from an unreasonable government intrusion.”
There was no basis for the FBI to turn off the cameras unless it was trying to hide something. And at the end of the day, the recording would have protected both the defendant and the FBI to ensure that everything was conducted lawfully. Yet the FBI can’t say that their investigation was carried out in such a manner.
aclj.org/government-corruptio...
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24 июн 2024
