As the fast moving events of the Mar-a-Lago FBI raid continue, for those who are a little fuzzy on the fine points of law enforcement – alleged criminal interactions, Lawfare has a slightly out of date tutorial available. I found this paragraph useful for clarifying my thoughts:
It is telling that the FBI sought a search warrant rather than relying on a grand jury subpoena for the documents in question. Subpoenas are typically used when the bureau has reason to trust that the recipient will hand over the information in question rather than obfuscating or destroying it. One possibility, raised by former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, is that the bureau and the Justice Department “could not be confident that the former President of the United States would comply with a grand jury subpoena.” Another possibility, assuming this was an effort to recover classified material, is that the bureau proceeded by search warrant because that is standard practice when attempting to recover spilled classified material.
I’m speculating that these boxes of confidential information have a certain monetary value to the right persons, and Trump was hoping to monetize them.
Which makes me wonder what had already gone out the door, sad to say.
