It’s not clear whether the witness is an employee of Mar-a-Lago, a personal aide to Trump, or part of the legal team surrounding Trump. It also may not even be new information: The federal government asserted when obtaining permission for the search of Mar-a-Lago that the evidence suggesting Trump was continuing to hide stolen classified documents included “eyewitness” testimony.
As Marcy Wheeler notes: “What has changed” as a result of this story is that “Trump has more of a line on” that FBI source. The leak to the Post may have the primary effect of narrowing down, in the Trump camp, who the “eyewitness” refusing to lie to the FBI on Trump’s behalf might be.
Trump now knows that one of the people who personally handled the boxes, and on his specific orders, is testifying to federal agents. That would narrow it down to a bare handful of Trump associates.
Whether this leak is from a pro-Trump source who’s using it as an opportunity to clue Trump’s defense team into who the government’s key witnesses are or is from investigators pushing the information to probe what Trump’s reactions will be, it again serves to emphasize that the FBI knows a lot about what Trump did between the time the federal government asked him to return government documents, some highly classified, and the day they drove into Mar-a-Lago to take those documents back via court order.
Investigators know Trump claimed he had returned all such documents, despite that being a clearly false statement; they know he moved the documents after the government told him they were aware he was lying. They also believe there are additional documents still unaccounted for.
That leads us right back to the next question: Why are federal agents not conducting similar searches of Trump’s other residences? They have proof Trump lied to them in an attempt to hide stolen classified documents. They have photographic evidence that Trump moved boxes similar to the ones found at Mar-a-Lago to his New Jersey estate.
But there’s been no searches of those additional locations, even after Trump provably hid national security secrets in his Mar-a-Lago office? Why?
Hunter
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