A former Justice Department prosecutor is calling upon Attorney General Merrick Garland to be more transparent about the unprecedented FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Ankush Khardori, a former trial attorney with the DOJ criminal division’s fraud section who has called for Donald Trump to be prosecuted and is a harsh critic of the former president, has been arguing that Garland needs to be more open about why the Justice Department searched the former president’s home.
Garland revealed he personally approved the search of Trump’s resort home in Florida, and the Justice Department agreed to unseal the search warrant, but, outside of a quick speech short on details last week, the attorney general hasn’t revealed much about the controversial raid. Also, the DOJ is fighting against releasing the affidavit justifying the search.
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“I would like to have seen a little bit more disclosure about what precipitated the search. I can imagine that’s very, very sensitive. Then something about the status of the investigation,” Khardori told Slate in a Wednesday interview. “And more to the point, what, if anything, has been going on with all these other investigations. I don’t think it’s been healthy, really, for the country to have been in this situation for the past year and a half. I don’t even think it’s really appropriate at this point for us to be operating in the dark here.”
Garland said last week: “I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter” and that DOJ “does not take such a decision lightly.” But he argued that “federal law, long-standing department rules, and our ethical obligations prevent me from providing further details as to the basis of the search” at that time.
“It has some merit, but none of those restrictions prohibit the sort of disclosure I’m talking about,” Khardori said of Garland’s claim. “The Justice Department has a media policy that says it generally does not comment on ongoing investigations. There is an explicit exception in that policy, if there is a basis or a reason to reassure the public that the department is investigating something.”
Khardori added: “There are constraints on potential disclosures on the particulars of what’s happening in an investigation and certain material that the government may have obtained. But I think the notion that the government is fully constrained or prevented from commenting on an ongoing investigation is really overstated.”
The former prosecutor noted that in news stories in which anonymous government officials with knowledge of the investigation are quoted, “these sorts of disclosures may be coming from the DOJ in significant cases” and that DOJ officials “will brief reporters off the record or on background.” He added, “These things happen. That’s just the reality of it.”
Numerous reports about the Trump raid have been based on anonymous leaks.
The Washington Post reported Thursday evening that “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought” in the Mar-a-Lago raid, according to “people familiar with the investigation.”
Trump denied that, saying that the “nuclear weapons issue is a hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax … the Mueller investigation was a hoax, and much more.”
Trump is being investigated for a possible Espionage Act violation and possible obstruction of justice, according to the warrant unsealed on Friday.
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Trump and his allies said he had declassified the records seized by the FBI, with the former president contending he had a “standing order” throughout his presidency that “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”
“Number one, it was all declassified. Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything,” Trump said on Truth Social, his social media website, last week when condemning the search. “They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago.”
A host of congressional Republicans have condemned the raid and called on Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and the National Archives to provide answers.
