If the FBI doesn’t have ‘bedrock-solid’ reasons for raiding former President Trump’s Florida home Monday, there should be ‘hell to pay,’ The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro declared.
The stunning raid was announced Monday evening by Trump himself, and was condemned by conservatives as an unprecedented politicization of the Department of Justice. The investigation is reportedly centered around classified material that Trump brought with him to Mar-a-Lago from the White House.
“We won’t know how fully insane the FBI raid on Trump is until we see the warrant and warrant application,” Shapiro tweeted. “But after Russiagate – years of investigation predicated largely on Clinton campaign misinformation — if the basis for this isn’t bedrock-solid, there should be hell to pay.”
“This sort of move requires serious levels of trust by the American public in its institutions,” Shapiro continued. “That trust no longer exists. If those institutions fail yet again, and target the leader of Joe Biden’s political opposition in doing so, this looks like banana republic stuff.”
“If Sandy Berger shoves classified documents in his pants, that’s unqualifiedly a legal violation,” Shapiro added, referring to the Clinton administration’s national security adviser’s actions. “But the president has the ability to declassify materials before leaving the White House. So this is even more dicey for the FBI and DOJ than usual, requiring real specifics.”
Shapiro also addressed reports that a conviction would bar Trump from holding political office again by saying those reports are false.
“[By the way], for those claiming that a violation of law regarding classified documents would prevent Trump from running, nope — the statutory penalties for any such violation do not overcome the Constitution definition of qualifications for eligibility,” Shapiro wrote.
The New York Times reported that Trump delayed returning the approximately 15 boxes of material to the National Archives which included documents that were “marked as classified national security information.”
Federal prosecutors opened a grand jury investigation back in May into Trump over whether classified material that ended up at his home in Mar-a-Lago was mishandled.
The main purpose of these types of investigations is usually for federal authorities to determine if any classified material was compromised so that intelligence officials can take steps to protect sensitive sources and methods. Prosecutors are seeking to learn every aspect of how the documents were handled from the time the documents left the White House until they were returned to the National Archives.
For prosecutors to be able to prove that a crime was committed, they would need evidence showing that the parties involved in removing the documents from the White House knew that the documents were classified and knew that removing them would violate the law.