OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Fox News host and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino was clearly upset by the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida Monday evening.
During an interview on network colleague Jesse Watters’ “Primetime” program, Bongino went ballistic on the Biden administration and the Justice Department, which he accused of becoming highly politicized in recent years, describing the raid as “third-world bullshit.”
According to Fox News, the raid “was in connection with materials that Trump took with him from his time as president.” The outlet quoted other sources who said the “National Archives and Records Administration referred the case to the Justice Department,” and agents “recovered 15 boxes of classified materials from” Trump’s estate, the outlet continued.
Bongino was furious.
“This is some third-world bullshit right here,” Bongino said. “Let me say it again, third-world bullshit. I mean every word of that. I don’t care that it’s cable news.
“I was a federal agent, I raised my right hand. And I swore to protect and defend the constitution of the United States. And I love this country. This is a freaking disgrace. A disgrace. We don’t live in Cuba. We don’t live under Kim Jong Un” of North Korea, he continued.
“We live in a constitutional republic. A representative democracy. You have a bunch of FBI agents raiding the home of a former president because they don’t like his politics? Are you kidding me?” he added.
“This is some third-world garbage that happened tonight,” he continued.
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Following the raid, Trump said that it was political in nature and meant to keep him from running again in 2024.
“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 group of FBI agents,” Trump said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”
Michael Tabman, former head of the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office, told Fox News the raid on a former president is “unprecedented.”
“We just haven’t investigated presidents after they’ve served their term,” he said. “But it is a huge move by the FBI in that the political sensitivities are clear. It’s obvious that they’re dealing on a very, sort of tenuous political climate when you go out and you investigate a president, especially one who says he may run for office again.”
He went on to note that getting a search warrant “is no minor task.”
“You have to certainly, as most people know, produce probable cause … to first get prosecutors who want to write this and present it to a judge – and then present it to a judge who has to agree that you have shown probable cause that a crime has been committed, there is evidence of the crime in the location that you state and at the time you plan to execute the warrant,” he said told Fox News. “So, there’s a lot of information that you have to be very convincing of to a federal judge and they scrutinize these.”
“And there’s no doubt in my mind that this went all the way to the attorney general before they took it to a judge,” Tabman added.
CNN claimed on Monday that the Biden White House was “blindsided” by the raid, indicating the current president had no prior knowledge, which drew some scrutiny of its own.
In an appearance on Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Lara Trump, wife of Eric Trump, talked about the long-term implications of the raid.
“If this is what they’re able to do to the former president of the United States, think about what they could do to you, to anybody in America,” she told guest host Will Cain. “The bottom line here is that these documents that have been in question have been – everybody’s cooperating, everybody from my father-in-law’s team – has been cooperating with the FBI with any authority that asks for anything up until now.
“There was no need to make such a big scene, to do something this insane, quite frankly, to a former president,” she added. “I think everybody clearly knows what’s going on here, Will. This is about weaponizing the justice system as it has been so many times in the past against somebody who you politically do not like.”
