Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman
Looking at today's reporting, I see the following that lends credence to my understanding:
"To get judicial approval for the search, investigators would have had to present to a judge a detailed affidavit that would establish that probable cause exists to believe that a crime had been committed and that that evidence of that crime exists in recent days at the property where the search is being sought."
"Not only would the investigators have to suggest it, not only would a line prosecutor have to agree with it, but multiple layers of management would have had to approved of it -- all the way up to the Attorney General," Daren Firestone, a former DOJ attorney, told CNN.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/09/politics/trump-mar-a-lago-search-explainer/index.html
Hi Rod: I agree with Mr. Firestone. The above is the way it should be done, and that is the way it hopefully was done in this instance. Two things could happen that would disappoint those who hope the DOJ can pin something on Trump.
(1) It is still possible, even if hopefully unlikely, that an over-zealous prosecutor could have overstated the probable cause evidence internally and to the court. That would be very bad for the DOJ.
(2) Perhaps more likely and more forgivable, a diligent prosecutorial team could have diligently developed strong probably cause based upon the evidence witnesses they deemed trustworthy provided them. James speculated early in the thread that someone in Trump's inner circle had flipped. Maybe so. If the prosecutors are playing it by the book, they certainly expect to find evidence of a crime when they execute a search warrant like this. But, what if the witnesses are wrong? what if they exaggerated? what if they
lied? It does not seem unreasonable to me that the FBI could come out of Mar-a-Lago with nothing better than Trump committing a misdemeanor by illegally holding classified documents in his home. No smoking gun evidence. Maybe it was never there. Maybe it has been destroyed (bleach bit anyone?) In such a case the raid nets nothing, not because the prosecutors are over-zealous, but because the witnesses they relied on are duds.
We will see how it all shakes out. Jim