Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, which is led in this Congress by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), have released portions of an interview done for the panel with a former top official at the FBI, and this figure’s remarks systematically undercut arguments about the new federal charges faced by Donald Trump that have been made by the ex-president himself and allies of his.
The individual providing these explanations to the committee was Steven D’Antuono, a former leading official at the Washington Field Office of the FBI. In direct response to a question from Jordan himself, D’Antuono explained how there were serious concerns about the potential further distribution of the protected information recovered from former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his southern Florida resort. It wasn’t politics.
“There was a large concern about the documents being lost, destroyed, going someplace else, right,” the witness told Jordan. “We don’t know what we’re going to find, but we surmised that they were classified documents based upon what we got in the initial 15 boxes, and then 37 or 38 that were handed to us in June… We didn’t believe that the security of those documents in that storage room would suffice to secure classified documents.”
Those comments also directly challenge some of Trump’s own prior remarks, seeing as he has tried to talk up the supposed security of Mar-a-Lago, although ostensibly heavy walls don’t just mean it’s okay to store whatever you want at the premises! Notably, D’Antuono also explained in the interview portions highlighted by Judiciary Democrats how there was an extensive review process before the warrant to search Mar-a-Lago was further sought and obtained. “Every attorney in the Bureau that could opine, the director’s office, his attorneys, they looked at this,” he said, discussing some of the warrant materials. The arguments that have been made about supposedly political motivations would generally entail a process opposite to what actually happened. This wasn’t just one guy or a few folks trying to enact a vendetta. Check out more at this link.
