NBC is out with a revealing report about the “bitter battle between the top FBI and DOJ officials” over whether to raid Mar-a-Lago.
Some FBI officials were also afraid that it would further erode the public’s confidence in them. They had that one right.
“You know what the reaction was in the department?” recalled a former FBI official involved in the case who asked not to be named. “We were like, ‘Oh shit, we don’t want any part of this. The real enemies are Russia and China.’”
They had concerns about politics being involved in the decision.
Career officials from the FBI Washington field office eventually took an unusual step. They privately questioned a career DOJ prosecutor’s political donations to Democrats and what they saw as his aggressive stance toward Trump. [….]
Several FBI agents in the Washington field office were concerned about the aggressive tactics and political donations of Jay Bratt, one of the Justice Department prosecutors.
According to public records, Bratt, who now works for special counsel Jack Smith, had donated $600 to a former DOJ colleague’s unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign for the U.S. Senate in Oregon in 2007, $150 to the Oregon Senate Democratic Campaign Committee that same year, and a total of $500 to the Democratic National Committee in 1993 and 1994.
It’s not a lot of money but donating to the DNC is not a good look. As Matt Vespa at our sister site Townhall observed, with officials at that level, it raises questions.
Steven D’Antuono, who was the head of the bureau’s Washington field office and who has since retired, was concerned Bratt was being “overly aggressive.” He said, “The aggressiveness that was there, from day one.”
Bratt declined an interview and the DOJ denied he had any bias.
When the FBI and the DOJ met on the question, “D’Antuono and several of his subordinates in the FBI’s Washington field office still didn’t think that the search needed to be done immediately.”
As the meeting dragged on, the discussion grew increasingly heated. Bratt raised his voice several times. When D’Antuono asked if prosecutors now considered Trump the subject of the investigation, Bratt shot back, “What does that matter?” but didn’t answer the question.
FBI officials from the Washington field office were in open conflict with Bratt and other DOJ prosecutors.
D’Antuono, convinced that a consensual search could end the standoff, stood his ground. He believed that they could negotiate with Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor, and reach an agreement for a voluntary search.
DOJ officials and senior FBI officials rejected the idea. They said that Trump and Corcoran had already received a subpoena and been repeatedly asked to return the documents.
D’Antuono dug in and said he would only have his agents search Mar-a-Lago if ordered to do so by his FBI superiors.
“I was trying to be a different voice in the room. Why do we have to be aggressive? We have an attorney in this case,” D’Antuono recalled. “If it didn’t work with Corcoran then fine. We would serve the search warrant and go in. No harm no foul.”
That’s quite normal to arrange things with the attorney. You do that because it’s also safer for the FBI as well, rather than doing a raid. It’s usually your first choice, rather than a raid in this type of a case, if indeed you have an attorney to deal with.
Then there was something else the FBI officials observed in the warrant that was also concerning.
After the DOJ officials left, the FBI officials spoke alone. D’Antuono and others from the Washington field office expressed a new concern. They noted that the draft search warrant included a potential criminal charge against Trump that they did not recall seeing before: Section 2071 of Title 18.
The law made it illegal for an individual who possesses government documents to “willfully and unlawfully” conceal, remove, mutilate, obliterate, falsify, or destroy them. If a person is convicted of the charge, they shall “be disqualified from holding” any federal office.
“The barring from office charge,” D’Antuono recalled. “People saw that charge as ‘Aha, is that DOJ’s effort to get Trump?’”
D’Antuono said he was scolded the next day by a DOJ official for resisting the search, “They put such urgency into getting into Mar-a-Lago, for the circumstances, it just didn’t smell right, it didn’t feel right.”
As Vespa notes, there was also the theory about possibly wanting to go to find “the comprehensive binder on the Russian collusion investigation, all the dirty laundry about this probe that House investigators compiled in 2019-2020 was at Mar-a-Lago.”
Sounds like there’s much more to investigate as to all the backstory here.
