A former top FBI agent has said he was afraid that the raid on Mar-a-Lago in 2022 would go wrong.
When former President Donald Trump left the White House in August 2022, the FBI broke into his home as part of a probe into whether he kept secret papers with him after leaving office.
Steve D’Antuono, who was in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office at the time, told NBC, “I was afraid that it would make people less trusting of us.”
“We all thought this was dangerous for our jobs and our personal lives,” the former FBI agent said.
He said that he was scolded for voicing his concerns about the raid in a high-stakes meeting.
He said, “I care a lot about doing the right thing for the right reasons. Getting into Mar-a-Lago was such a rush that, given the situation, it just didn’t smell or feel right.”
D’Antuono said he was concerned that Jay Bratt, a lawyer for the Justice Department, “was being a little too pushy.”
Between 1993 and 2007, Bratt gave a lot of money to Democratic politicians.
According to NBC News’ national security editor David Rohde’s book “Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy,” D’Antuono and other FBI agents were trying to get back any papers Trump had without getting into a fight. He said that a search with Trump’s permission could get back anything that Trump had, and he said that he would only order the raid if told to.
“My goal was to be a different voice in the room. Why do we have to be so mean? We have a lawyer in this case,” D’Antuono told NBC in his new interview. “We would go inside and carry out the search order with no harm, no foul.”
He said the FBI was ready to act if papers were taken away.
D’Antuono said, “I didn’t see any reason not to do it that way.”
He said that the potential charges, which included ones to remove Trump from office for illegally having secret papers, made people more suspicious.
“The charge of leaving office. That charge made people think, ‘Aha, is that the DOJ trying to get Trump?'” he said.
In an interview before he testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, D’Antuono said he thought the raid was done in a way that let the FBI off the hook.
“So it wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, but anything like this, this seriousness, you know, we asked for it,” he said at the time.
He said, “From our point of view, we just didn’t want this to become a show. So—and there was no reason to break in, raid, or do anything else like that.”
Author: Steven Sinclaire
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