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One of former President Donald Trump’s attorneys is blasting the Justice Department anew following the FBI’s unprecedented raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate last week.
In an interview with Newsmax TV, Alina Habba said the raid was little more than a “public spectacle” to distract from the failed policies of the Democrat-controlled Congress and President Joe Biden.
“This is a very normal system. The president leaves, they declassify it, and let’s say there’s something [the National Archives] wants back, they work with them to get it back. It happens all the time. It’s very normal,” Habba told “National Report.”
“[What] they have done is to take something that is incredibly routine and make it a public spectacle. Why? Because in November we have a midterm election, and the Democrats are not leading,” she said, adding: “We have inflation; we have issues because President Biden [has] really caused a problem for them.”
Habba went on to cite early reports claiming that Trump may have been in possession of top-secret nuclear weapons information such as launch codes.
“Even if there was classified nuclear codes, as they say, which I would be shocked, but even if there was, when you are cooperating, there is no need to send in 30 FBI agents with guns into somebody’s home, let alone a former president; [it] doesn’t make sense,” Habba, managing partner of the Habba Madaio & Associates law firm — which has represented Trump in a number of cases — added.
The DOJ has released the search warrant along with a list of property and items seized from Trump during the raid on his Palm Beach, Fla., estate a week ago Monday. However, the department is resisting legal efforts that would force officials to make public the affidavit citing “probable cause” for the search, which Trump is also demanding, Newsmax reported.
“If disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” Reuters noted, citing prosecutors’ objections to revealing the affidavit.
Several news outlets including the Washington Post, CNN, and NBC News, as well as the conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch, noted in a Monday court filing that the affidavit ought to be released because it involves a government investigation into a former president.
“Not since the Nixon administration has a president been the subject of such a dramatic and public criminal process,” CNN reported the media outlets argued in their filing, saying they are “attempting to shed light on the federal government’s unprecedented actions and motivations.”
“Here, there could not be a more ‘historically significant event’ than an FBI raid of a former President’s home for the alleged removal of national security records after leaving office,” the outlets wrote.
Trump has also publicly called for the affidavit to be unsealed.
“There is no way to justify the unannounced rate of Mara Lago, the home of the 45th, president of the United States, who got more votes by far than any sitting president in the history of our country, by a very large number of gun-toting FBI agents and the department of justice,” the former president posted on his Truth Social platform. “In the interest of transparency, I call for the immediate release of the completely un-redacted affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking break-in.”
Several others have criticized the raid as well.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted on his Tuesday program that it appears obvious now that the Biden administration will indict the former president.
“Obviously, they’re going to do that. Who knows how,” he said.
“Indicting Donald Trump is a very big step, not simply because a lot of people like him, and he’s the former president, but because indicting him at this point would be to reveal that this entire thing, and by thing we mean our justice system, is just transparently political. It’s just a means to an end, a means to power, and people know that at this point,” he continued. “And that means that we are at this point on the edge of something unprecedented and something awful.”
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