The heavily redacted affidavit released on Friday for the warrant for former President Donald Trump's house, "even absent the redactions," does not show that there was an imminent national security threat that justified raiding his home, Rep. Mike Turner said Sunday.
"The former president's home was raided in the most invasive manner in which the FBI could have gone about this," the Ohio Republican said on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo." "The Department of Justice could have gone to court and tried to have the subpoena that they had enforced by the court. Instead, they chose to raid Mar-a-Lago."
The affidavit cites personnel from the National Archives, not the intelligence community, about whether the documents pose a threat, he continued.
"This is more like a bookkeeping issue than a national security threat, which means it doesn't rise to the level of justifying raiding the former president's home," said Turner.
Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said in a note to members of Congress that she was not aware that the raid was going to happen, but her department will begin the process of looking at the records Trump took with him from the White House, both those taken in the raid and the ones he voluntarily surrendered.
"Well, that means that the FBI is flying alone here," said Turner. "Supposedly, they're looking for classified documents, but they're not talking to anybody who deals with classified information, and that would seem to indicate this is very, very suspect as to why it would rise to the level of needing to raid," said Turner.
The DNI will have to review the documents before coming to Congress for a briefing, but it's a mystery why that office hasn't already been involved, he continued.
He also questioned the FBI's raid of the home of Project Veritas because it had possession of a diary owned by Biden's daughter, calling it "curious because that doesn't rise to the level of any national security threat."
Meanwhile, even though Trump and his adviser Kash Patel have said the documents that were taken had been declassified, Turner said there must be some "substantiation of this."
"No one is questioning that President Trump had full authority to do that as president, but the question's going to be how can they document that it occurred," he said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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