Two senior government officials revealed that an informant operating inside former President Donald Trump’s inner circle told the FBI what Trump was holding in his private home at Mar-a-Lago, according to reports.
“The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur when the former president was away,” reported Newsweek.
The FBI was also hoping to keep the raid low-profile to avoid a “media circus” and prevent any photos or videos of the raid, which one of the officials told Newsweek was a “spectacular backfire.”
“I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action,” the official said. “They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite.”
“They were seeking to avoid any media circus,” the source continued. “So even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout.”
The unprecedented search of Trump’s home comes as the investigation into his time in office and private business escalates. Any search of a private residence would have to be approved by a judge after the investigating law enforcement agency demonstrated probable cause that the search was justified.
Trump and his legal team already filed a motion last week seeking an independent review of the records seized by authorities.
“They demanded that the security cameras be turned off, a request we rightfully denied. They prevented my attorneys from observing what was being taken in the raid, saying ‘absolutely not,'” he said in a statement. “They took documents covered by attorney-client and executive privilege, which is not allowed. They took my passports. They even brought a ‘safe cracker’ and successfully broke into my personal safe, which revealed… nothing!”
Trump is the only former president to be raided by the FBI, including President Barack Obama, who Trump has alleged was a part of spying on his 2016 presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton.
