Fresh reporting in Newsweek on Wednesday revealed another revelation about the events that preceded this week's FBI raid of President Trump's Mar-A-Lago: there was an inside man (or woman).
A piece from William Arkin reported that the FBI's unprecedented Monday raid "was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents" according to "two senior government officials."
Newsweek is reporting that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was based on an confidential informant who gave specific information on what was being hidden and where. https://t.co/8LRRnYeno5
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 10, 2022
Those officials also told Newsweek that the raid was "deliberately timed" to happen when Trump was not at his "Southern White House." Trump was in New York City when feds descended on the property and conducted their hours-long search.
"FBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event," the source with three decades of experience with the FBI told Newsweek. That goal, clearly, was not met — and how could anyone have expected the Biden DOJ raiding the home of the former president to not be a high-profile development?
...What is bizarre is that Newsweek says that agents thought they could "lower the profile" of the raid since Trump was not present. That borders on the delusional if true...
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 10, 2022
The profile of the raid seemingly could not be any higher, and Republicans have united behind the 45th president in the wake of the raid in a way not seen since he left office in January 2021.
"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," one of Newsweek's sources admitted. No kidding.
So now the question, and likely President Trump and his aides' attention, turns to who in Trump's orbit — seemingly close enough to know what documents he had in his possession at Mar-A-Lago and where they were stored — flipped to become an informant for the FBI amid a Department of Justice investigation of the former president.