On Monday, August 8, the FBI executed a search warrant on the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump — and the following day, the search continued to be a major topic on CNN. There are many questions about the search and the reasons behind it, and a CNN panel grappled with some of those questions during a Tuesday morning, August 9 panel discussion that included CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins, legal analyst Elie Honig, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman and others.
Collins noted that FBI agents, during the search, used a "padlock" to secure one of the rooms at Mar-a-Lago — adding, "Now, what exactly was inside that room, what the documents were, we don't know yet. That is something that the investigators, we are told, did look around the room, but it's still unclear exactly what it was."
The FBI search, Collins noted, raises "questions" about "what happened and what changed" between June — when investigators requested documents — and the search warrant being executed on August 8.
Honig told the panel, "I think it's reasonable to assume, from Kaitlan's reporting, that something went haywire, something went wrong between June and yesterday. And here's why. If you are a prosecutor and you ask the person who you want to search: 'Hey, those are the documents we want. Please hold them there, please padlock the room' — and you believed that they were actually doing that without messing with the documents in any way, interfering with them, destroying them — if you believe they were holding them safely, you would not go and get a search warrant. You would hand them a subpoena, which is a piece of paper saying you are hereby ordered to give me those documents. It's a much less painful, much less invasive of privacy way to get those documents. "
Honig continued, "The fact that DOJ went through the trouble of writing up their probable cause, bringing it to a judge and then sending armed agents in to seize these documents tells me that something wrong that DOJ did not believe those documents were being maintained."
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