A former top FBI official has revealed that he worried the FBI’s 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago would backfire.
In August 2022, the FBI swooped in on the residence of former President Donald Trump as part of its investigation into whether Trump improperly;y kept classified documents in his possession after leaving the White House.
“I was worried about it increasing distrust in us,” Steve D’Antuono, the head of the Washington Field Office of the FBI at the time, said, according to NBC.
“We all thought this posed a risk to us both professionally and personally. I can’t impress upon you the pressure,” the retired FBI official said.
D’Antuono said expressing his reservations during a high-stakes meeting on the raid led to him being scolded.
“I take it to heart to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons,” he said. “They put such urgency into getting into Mar-a-Lago, for the circumstances, it just didn’t smell right, it didn’t feel right.”
D’Antuono said he was worried that Justice Department prosecutor Jay Bratt “was being a little overly aggressive.”
Bratt made multiple donations to Democratic candidates between 1993 and 2007.
Citing information from the book “Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy,” by David Rohde, NBC News’ national security editor, NBC painted D’Antuono and other FBI agents as trying to recover any documents Trump had without a confrontation. He said a consensual search could get anything back that was in Trump possessed, and said he would only order the raid if ordered to do so.
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“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 said to NBC in his new interview. “If it didn’t work with Corcoran then fine. We would serve the search warrant and go in. No harm no foul.”
He said the FBI was ready to react if documents were removed.
“In my opinion, there was no harm in doing it that way,” D’Antuono said.
Suspicions grew due to the charges being prepared, including ones to bar Trump from office for unlawfully having classified documents, he said.
“The barring from office charge. People saw that charge as ‘Aha, is that DOJ’s effort to get Trump?’” he explained.
During his 2023 appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, D’Antuono indicated in an interview the raid was handled in a way he thought left the FBI open to criticism.
“So it wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, but something like this, the severity of this, you know, we were asking for it,” he said then.
He said that from his perspective “We just did not want a spectacle of this. And so — and there was no reason to raid or break down a door or anything like that.”
Elsewhere, he called the raid “a reputational risk” for the FBI.
“I do think there was a good likelihood that we could have got a consent and then we wouldn’t have had to — I think the Bureau — we left — we were left holding the bag again, right, and we cut ourselves,” he said in the transcribed 2023 interview.
