Today, Explained - Raid-a-Lago

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Florida man's beach house searched by FBI. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Avishay Artsy with help from Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amina Al-Sadi and Victoria Dominguez, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

These are dark times for our nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large number of FBI agents. Florida man's beach house searched by FBI, except this time, the Florida man is the former president of the United States. Nothing like this has ever happened to a president of the United States before. He wastes zero time politicizing the raid. The political persecution of President Donald J. Trump has been going on for years. With the now fully debunked Russia, Russia, Russia scam, impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two, and so much more. It just never ends.

It is political targeting at the highest level. Ahead on Today Explained, what we know and what it means for the Florida man who wasn't home when Mar-a-Lago was raided. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today explained, but we're going to talk about yesterday.

We called up Andrea Bernstein to help. I'm the co-host of the podcast Will Be Wild about the road to January 6th. But also was the co-host of the podcast Trump Inc. Lastly, I'm the author of American Oligarchs, the Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power. All to say that you got some very surprising news last night. Very surprising news. There's breaking news out of Palm Beach, Florida. Former President Trump says his Mar-a-Lago home there is being raided by the FBI right now. He describes it as a siege, calling the raid unannounced.

That the FBI had paid a call on the former president's club at Mar-a-Lago. Agents met much of yesterday at the club in Palm Beach, and CBS News has learned that the search was in regards to missing White House records. After they left, dozens of demonstrators arrived, showing their support for the former president. Did anyone out there see this coming? I mean, I don't think it was widely expected. There has been this investigation sort of bubbling along.

The National Archives talking to the Justice Department about whether there should be a criminal case here. It is against the law to destroy government documents, especially if there's any question about whether classified material was mishandled. They'd found out about these documents in the course of their archiving the presidency. And so they went and got them from Mar-a-Lago, 15 boxes. This was at the beginning of the year. We know that because there was reporting and a couple of congressional committees wrote to the National Archives and they said, please tell us what is going on. And the National Archives actually responded. It was a letter to Carolyn Maloney, Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York, who is the chair of the House Oversight Committee. And she had sent them a

letter saying, please tell us what you know. And they sent a response saying that they had had communications. These communications had lasted through 2021. They had resulted in the transfer of 15 boxes to NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, in January of 2022, and that they had found that some of the boxes contained classified material. Some of these records are things like social media accounts. For example, Donald Trump's personal Twitter account that has since been suspended, the official POTUS account that he used to use when he was in office. There are questions about whether or not those were archived correctly and whether or not direct messages or private messages were part of those archives.

The way they phrased it was, NARA has identified items marked as classified national security information within the boxes. And as a result of that, they said, they were in communication with the Department of Justice. So this investigation that the Justice Department undertook into how those boxes of information got to Mar-a-Lago, we've known it's been going on, but it's sort of been bubbling along a little bit on the back burner as people have focused on the front burner, the January 6th committee, the investigation in Georgia into whether Trump tampered with the election there, the New York investigations into his business records.

So we knew about it. There has not been a lot of reporting or discussion recently about this investigation. And it sort of only shows up on the kind of complete lists of Trump investigations. So all of a sudden, now it's very much front and center. So can we assume the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago on Monday as a continuation of that National Archives documents investigation? The Justice Department isn't commenting. The FBI isn't commenting.

But there has been reporting in Occam's Razor. We knew that they've been investigating how documents got there, that that is what they were looking for. The president was not there. Right. The president's not usually there in the summer because summer in Florida, not too pleasant. He usually spends his summers at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and was apparently in New York on the day of the raid, was not at his Florida home. And we have no idea if they found what they were looking for yet.

However, if they did, why are these documents so important? Once you are the former president, if those documents, if he had not declassified those documents while president, which he had the power to do while president, that is a crime to be in possession of this kind of information. But what they were searching for we don't know however i will say having read the documents typically uh that a judge looks at the application for a search warrant can run to hundreds of pages and it's not just you know we think maybe there might be something there we'd like to see to be thorough it, we believe there is something there that is pertinent to the investigation. And then they have to justify it.

They have to justify it with extensive documentation. And it has to be signed off on by a different branch of government, by the judicial branch. So in order for the FBI to execute a raid, there has to be considerable evidence in the eyes of the FBI that would allow this to happen. And obviously, when you have a political person at the other end of a search warrant, the standards are even higher. All of the I's really need to be dotted and all the T's crossed. So you're saying a ton of work went into this raid before anyone stepped foot on Mar-a-Lago? Well, that is typically what happens when there's an investigation that's executed like this.

Eventually, you know, when somebody goes to trial or when there is a sort of, you know, if there's an indictment or if there's legal action on a case, you can frequently, these documents will become part of the public record. They are not now. So I, for example, read the search warrant in the Michael Cohen case, which was a search warrant that was executed against the former president's former attorney in April of 2018. And I read the search warrant in the Paul Manafort case. In each of these cases, the FBI had to itemize lots and lots of documents and evidence that they had seen that raised questions that could only be answered by the execution of a raid on the premises. Does a raid like this necessarily mean that some smoking gun is sure to be retrieved. No.

And, you know, that is why there is a process, right? The FBI is doing an investigation. They have to believe to do something so disruptive and high profile as this, and obviously, potentially, something that could have an impact on a possible criminal case should one develop. In order to do this, they have to really believe and have the evidence that something's there, but it doesn't mean they're going to find something. And there can be plenty of investigations where all the available evidence points to the existence of some record or that some crime has been committed, but that at the end of the day, they don't sew it up. And these things can take a long, long time.

I mean, for perspective, another former attorney for the former president, Rudy Giuliani, had his home raided in April of 2021. And there has been no resolution to that case. We're looking now at a year and a half later. So it doesn't mean they will find anything. It doesn't mean that there's going to be any resolution. It doesn't mean we're going to learn anything else. It's just the stakes are obviously higher in this really unprecedented raid of the home of a former president. So one would expect, and from all the conversations I've had previously with prosecutors and former prosecutors and former FBI agents and lawyers, this kind of thing is not entertained or executed lightly.

More with Andrea in a minute on Today Explained. Thank you. Oraframe by Wirecutter. Oraframe is to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Oraframe as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Oraframe for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids.

And so we wanted to surprise her with the Aura Frame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting oraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames

with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, Bye-bye. your team, your favorite player, or your style. There's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk,

and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager Ontario only Please play responsibly If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling Or someone close to you Please contact Connex Ontario At 1-866-531-2600

To speak to an advisor Free of charge BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement With iGaming Ontario Today Today Explain operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today, today explained. Andrea, I want to ask you some questions about the politics. Let's start with the man himself.

How is the former president of the United States responding to this raid? It was the former president who broke the news to the world. Yes, he did. These are dark times for our nation. As my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large number of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a president of the United States before. And I think, you know, it is a way to try to seize control of information, which is to let it out yourself before someone else does. And, you know, he described it in the terms that he usually describes, you know, break-ins and, you know, my beautiful home and outrage. Such an assault could only take place in broken third world countries.

Sadly, America has now become one of those countries. Corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe. What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th president of the United States. At no point in this letter does the president acknowledge

his proclivity to do crimes, but can we talk about what we know about how he handles classified documents? Right. And, I mean, we should say the president has never been charged with a crime, even though he has been engaged in thousands and thousands and thousands upon thousands of civil lawsuits and been subject to dozens of government investigations. He has never been charged with a crime. In some of the reporting on this raid,

the date April of 2022 was raised. It's a time when the FBI had gone to Mar-a-Lago and spoke to Trump about these documents. And Trump pointed to that in his statement saying, you know, he was cooperating. Why were they doing this? This language is striking and this date was striking because in April of 2022 is when Trump was cited in contempt of court in New York in order to pay $10,000 a day for refusing to turn over documents to the New York Attorney General. Attorneys for Mr. Trump claim he does not have the documents James is requesting, but the judge ruled the lawyers didn't provide enough details about how they tried to find them. These were documents that she had been seeking, according to the lawyers in her office, for well over a year. And they'd finally gone to the judge, thrown their hands up in the air and said, we're not getting these things. We need you to hold him in contempt of court and fine him

for not turning over these documents. That is what happened. Eventually, the matter was resolved, but not before the former president was fined in excess of $100,000. So this is just one example of the former president refusing to turn over documents to investigators. It has happened over and over and over again. You may recall that the Manhattan District Attorney had to go to the U.S. Supreme Court twice to get Trump to turn over documents in its investigation of Trump's business practices. The House Committee investigating January 6th had to go to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to get documents from the National Archives. So Trump notoriously, since his early days as a businessman, has tried to hide business records from whoever is asking for them.

And in some cases, it's government bodies. In some cases, it's us in the media. In some cases, it's potential business partners. It's a pattern that we've seen over and over and over again. So it's in no way surprising that we are seeing the outlines of that kind of activity here. I also want to say when Trump was in the White House, we know that he would routinely rip up documents. His thing was he didn't care what records was. He frequently tore up memos or things and just threw them in the trash. And when the January 6th committee finally got those documents that it went to the Supreme Court to get, some of them came back in the form of taped up documents. So this is something that the former president routinely does, destroys records, hides records, tries to keep them out of the hands of government authorities. And we don't know all the facts about this. We don't

know exactly what happened in this case, but the pattern of events certainly suggests that the FBI had gotten to the end of its rope and did not believe that Trump was going to cooperate with them. But even taking these documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, if indeed the president did that, would have been, is the word illegal? Well, I do want to be cautious because it's obviously illegal to mishandle classified documents. What I don't know and what is not known here is were any of these documents declass has gotten a judge to approve that search warrant, and if prosecutors have gotten the judge to approve that search warrant, then certainly they have probable cause to believe that a crime was committed. The former president also immediately politicizes the whole affair. He talks about the hoax impeachments. He talks about Hillary Clinton's

emails. This is language that Trump has been basically employing forever. It's a theme that I have read over and over and over, that I've heard Trump say over and over and over whenever he is investigated, which has been often in his business career, Donald Trump has said it is politically motivated. Jesse, it almost feels like a preemptive coup. We've heard so much about the insurrection and the coup, but this is preventing, this is meant to prevent Donald Trump from being able to run again. All they want to do is they want to get Donald Trump. They raise money on it. They send fundraising emails about it. They brag on camera about it. They go after him.

They subpoena him. I'm probably the most subpoenaed person in the history of the United States. Every single day we get another subpoena. And they do it for one reason, because they don't want Donald Trump to run and win again in 2024. And Sean, that's what this is about today.

All you hear is them accusing the Biden Justice Department of being politically motivated without evidence. And while all of the facts that are on the record suggest that, in fact, this is likely a very well-founded raid. Since you said the B word, let me ask you a question about President Biden. Do we have any idea if the current sitting president knew this was going to happen yesterday, that his Justice Department was going to be raiding the palace of the former president? By all accounts, the White House was taken completely off guard. The Attorney General Merrick Garland has been under relentless criticism from Democrats for not doing enough to investigate the former president.

So the fact that the White House knew nothing about it kind of goes hand in hand with the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, keeping his cards very, very, very close to the vest. So close that not even the president is aware. The timing is kind of remarkable. I mean, President Biden came into office and seemed to not really want to talk about the former president, certainly made no noise about investigating the former president, at least himself.

And here we are months out from a midterm election and perhaps the former president announcing his campaign for 2024. And you have President Biden's Department of Justice, the FBI, raiding Mar-a-Lago. Could this have been done earlier and thus, I don't know, saved face, at least as it relates to the politics here i don't i i i'm not reading too much into the timing um if anything there's been a very loud uh course of the of criticism that the justice department has not moved quickly enough in its various investigations of Donald Trump and the people around him. From my experience of reporting on criminal cases and criminal investigations that involve high-level politicians, they take place very slowly and deliberately. So to what we were just talking about, that this has to go through several layers of approval, most likely.

That is not a kind of thing that happens quickly. So, you know, it's my guess that this happened when the people at the Justice Department felt that they had enough evidence to go to a judge. Okay. Not sooner and not later. Andrea, I truly appreciate your aversion to speculation. that perhaps indict the former president in some way that could affect his running for reelection in 2024? There really is no evidence of that. And in fact, there's evidence to the contrary, which is that both President Biden and Attorney

General Garland seem to have had an aversion to brisk action against the former president because they don't want to be seen as politicizing it. So all of the available evidence, all of their public comments, their actions as we see them unfolding, suggest that they are taking these actions because they feel they have no alternative. But if these documents lead to some sort of charges, I guess what I'm trying to understand is, could those charges then bar the president from running for re-election? So we're in the if-if-if land here. Yeah. Once a raid has occurred of this nature, there's something called a taint team that is involved, which means that a separate

group, typically prosecutors and FBI agents, will review documents to make sure no communications are privileged. In previous cases, for example, both Rudy Giuliani and Michael Cohen's cases, there had to be somebody appointed from the courts to review those documents. That can take a very, very long time to do. Then, once that's done, the prosecutors and FBI agents on the case can take a look and see if they think that they've gotten the evidence. So it is a long time coming. So it would be shocking, for example, if the midterm is the date in your calendar that you're thinking about, if that all happened before the midterms. Could it come in the middle of a presidential election? Potentially, but I think the issue is that if you're the Justice Department, what are you going to do? If you learn there's evidence of a crime, there's a clock that has

been ticking that is set by the four-year clock of elections, that is a very short clock when laid against a criminal investigation. There are so many investigations that involve Donald Trump that are going on right now. There are Justice Department investigations of whether he was involved in the fake elector scheme, a conspiracy to defraud the United States, perhaps. There are investigations by the inspector general of the Justice Department into whether a man who he wanted to install into the Justice Department to be attorney general had nefarious or criminal aims. There are records that have been seized by his former associates in relation to January 6th.

There is a civil investigation in New York into his business practices. There is a criminal investigation in Georgia into whether he tried to tamper with the election outcome there. So there are so many things we are talking about, not even mentioning the January 6th investigation, which is not a criminal investigation, but which has been turning up massive amounts of evidence, so much so that a federal judge said there was reason to believe that Trump had committed a crime in relationship to January 6th. So all of these things are out there in the ether, they're being talked about, they're being picked over, they're being dissected. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it seems this is the thing that prompts the federal

government to take this dramatic action. To me, that is significant in telling that we really don't know what the Justice Department is doing. We don't know what it has up its sleeve. And we don't know what's to come. And we're, to some extent, just going to have to wait and see. Andrea Bernstein, she's the host of the Will Be Wild podcast about January 6th and all that's followed. She's also the author of American Oligarchs, The Kushners, The Trumps, and The Marriage of Money and Power. I'm Sean Ramos from This Episode of Today Explained was brought to you by Halima Shah,

Avishai Artsy, Matthew Collette, Hadi Mawagdi, Paul Mounsey, Laura Bullard, Victoria Dominguez, Amina Alsadi, and Afim Shapiro with extra help from Patrick Boyd and Amanda Rose Smith. Thank you.