OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A Republican who has become known as a never Trumper has spoken against the raid on the home of former President Donald Trump.
Republican New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu said that he believes the raid on the former president’s home was done for political reasons, to give Democrats an edge in the midterm elections.
“If you’re going to take unprecedented action and raid a former president’s house,” he said to CNN host Dana Bash, “you better have a strategy for unprecedented transparency. I think we’re all concerned about what might be in those documents. Some were classified, some weren’t, what the serious nature was, but show us! You’ve gotta to be able to show your cards when you’re taking actions like this.”
Bash said that the RFBI was looking for classified documents they posed a national security risk “so they can’t reveal everything” in the affidavit.
The governor said people should be “concerned” about the documents, “but I don’t know what to be concerned about.”
“No one seems to,” he said. “What’s the subject matter? What’s the dates? What’s the times? What are we talking about here?…I’m not saying put all the documents on the Internet, but give us some sense of the subject matter. Give us some sense of the timing. Give us some sense of what really drove us in there.”
He then made his case about the timing of the search.
“This has been a year and a half in the making. Former President Trump has been out of office for going on two years now. You think this is a coincidence just happening a few months before the midterm elections and all that sort of thing? So, you know, this is unprecedented. They had to have an unprecedented strategy, which they clearly didn’t have. They’re on their heels. They don’t know what to do. We want to see the information so we can have this discussion, we can talk about the subject matter with some sense,” he said.
In fairness, Gov. Chris Sununu did go on CNN and suggest the Mar-a-Lago raid was a conspiracy to help Democrats in the midterms. So Trump has that going for him. pic.twitter.com/8jIlUXDLx8
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 28, 2022
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who served as one of Donald Trump’s top lawyers, has responded to the Justice Department’s unsealing of the affidavit used to authorize the FBI’s raid on the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.
In an interview with Newsmax TV’s Rita Cosby, Giuliani, who is also a former federal prosecutor, said that although the heavily redacted affidavit showed little to the public, he believes it revealed everything about how the raid and subsequent seizure of documents and items were illegal.
“This is a completely illegal warrant, for numerous reasons, that the least of which is it really isn’t a search warrant,” Giuliani told “Saturday Report,” going on to point out that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect Americans from overly broad, invasive searches.
“This is a general search warrant. Search warrants are supposed to be for a specific thing,” he said.
Giuliani himself was raided by the FBI in late April 2021, with agents “seizing computers and cellphones in a major escalation of the Justice Department’s investigation into the business dealings” of the former NYC mayor, The Associated Press reported at the time.
“The affidavit they had for my search warrant — although discovered nothing illegal; thank God, everything got sent back to me — but at least it was narrow to electronics,” Giuliani said. “This, I mean, they took his passport. Everything here should be suppressed. In other words, I actually believe this could never be used in a criminal case.
“This is about as illegal search as you’re going to get,” he continued, adding that the Justice Department took its time to seek the raid though officials claimed that the situation at the former president’s estate was urgent.
“A warrant is supposed to be exigent circumstances — emergency — 11 days for an emergency?” Giuliani told Cosby. “And then the FBI took three days off to execute it, and this is important?
“Don’t we do things that are important, fast? Right? Don’t we do things that are unimportant, slow?” he asked.
