Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) said the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is an “unprecedented action that needs to be supported by unprecedented justification.”
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, Fitzpatrick, himself a former FBI agent, said that it is incumbent upon members of Congress on both the right and left not to rush to conclusions without more evidence.
Fitzpatrick also said that the Department of Justice should release the affidavit of probable cause in order to clarify the torrent of conflicting information from the press and the actual documents themselves.
“It was an unprecedented action that needs to be supported by unprecedented justification,” Fitzpatrick said of the raid. “Part A, was it unprecedented action? Yes, we know that. This has never happened before in our country’s history. To the second question, was there unprecedented justification? That’s remains an open question and we know exactly where to look, the affidavit of probable cause, the one document that remains under seal.”
“Because we don’t have that information, I’ve encouraged all my colleagues on the left and the right to reserve judgment and not get ahead of yourself because we don’t know what that document contains,” he continued. “It’s going to answer a lot of questions. When we had the press conference on Friday with my fellow [House] Intelligence Committee members, I telegraphed to the press then, I said the documents you’ll see unsealed [Friday], which was the warrant, the rider to the warrant and the property receipt, are not going to shed a whole lot of light beyond the statutes that were being investigated.”
Fitzpatrick acknowledged that while mishandling classified material violates federal law, it was not clear that that happened because of conflicting reports from the press and the Biden administration.
“The problem is the administration is disputing a lot of what’s being publicly reported, so the affidavit will answer that question,” he said. “It will be able to tell us who is providing misinformation– is it the prior administration or the current administration? We need to get that clarified.”
“At the very least if [the DOJ] don’t want to unseal it for public consumption, they can certainly bring it into the [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] to bring it to our House Intelligence Committee members,” Fitzpatrick said.