A former top FBI official has revealed that he worried the FBIâs 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago would backfire.
In August 2022, the FBI swooped in on the residence of former President Donald Trump as part of its investigation into whether Trump improperly;y kept classified documents in his possession after leaving the White House.
âI was worried about it increasing distrust in us,â Steve DâAntuono, the head of the Washington Field Office of the FBI at the time, said, according to NBC.
âWe all thought this posed a risk to us both professionally and personally. I canât impress upon you the pressure,â the retired FBI official said.
DâAntuono said expressing his reservations during a high-stakes meeting on the raid led to him being scolded.
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âI take it to heart to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons,â he said. âThey put such urgency into getting into Mar-a-Lago, for the circumstances, it just didnât smell right, it didnât feel right.â
DâAntuono said he was worried that Justice Department prosecutor Jay Bratt âwas being a little overly aggressive.â
Bratt made multiple donations to Democratic candidates between 1993 and 2007.
Citing information from the book âWhere Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy,â by David Rohde, NBC Newsâ national security editor, NBC painted DâAntuono and other FBI agents as trying to recover any documents Trump had without a confrontation. He said a consensual search could get anything back that was in Trump possessed, and said he would only order the raid if ordered to do so.
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âI was trying to be a different voice in the room. Why do we have to be aggressive? We have an attorney in this case,â DâAntuono said to NBC in his new interview. âIf it didnât work with Corcoran then fine. We would serve the search warrant and go in. No harm no foul.â
He said the FBI was ready to react if documents were removed.
âIn my opinion, there was no harm in doing it that way,â DâAntuono said.
Suspicions grew due to the charges being prepared, including ones to bar Trump from office for unlawfully having classified documents, he said.
âThe barring from office charge. People saw that charge as âAha, is that DOJâs effort to get Trump?ââ he explained.
During his 2023 appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, DâAntuono indicated in an interview the raid was handled in a way he thought left the FBI open to criticism.
âSo it wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, but something like this, the severity of this, you know, we were asking for it,â he said then.
He said that from his perspective âWe just did not want a spectacle of this. And so — and there was no reason to raid or break down a door or anything like that.â
Elsewhere, he called the raid âa reputational riskâ for the FBI.
âI do think there was a good likelihood that we could have got a consent and then we wouldn’t have had to — I think the Bureau — we left — we were left holding the bag again, right, and we cut ourselves,â he said in the transcribed 2023 interview.