‘Oh My Lord!’ CNN Analyst Stunned By Revelation About Mar-a-Lago Surveillance Footage
CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams was stunned by revelations about the events that led the FBI to raid former President Donald Trump‘s Mar-a-Lago resort home, exclaiming, “You have to count all the crimes!”
Tuesday morning’s edition of CNN’s New Day, co-anchors Brianna Keilar and John Berman hosted Williams and former FBI Deputy Director-turned-CNN contributor Andrew McCabe to discuss New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman‘s latest reporting on the investigation of Trump for crimes involving the Espionage Act that led the FBI to search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home last week.
McCabe remarked that Trump’s reported objection to returning the documents — “It’s not theirs, it’s mine” — shows “intentionality” on his part.
“Any of us who’ve raised children have heard that same response in a number of contexts. That doesn’t really indicate a high degree of understanding of the Presidential Records Act or property law, for that matter. But I think that’s been clear from the very beginning. There is an intentionality here,” McCabe said.
Williams agreed, pointing out that when you work in the White House, “You are warned from the day you get in, multiple times throughout, and on the day you leave, that these are not your documents and you have to turn them over.”
But Williams really became animated when Berman asked him about the surveillance footage that prompted concern from the FBI:
JOHN BERMAN: Let me read another quote from Maggie Haberman reporting that deals with surveillance footage and the fact that they were alarmed with what they saw.
“At that point at least one Trump lawyer signed a statement saying material with the classified markings had been returned, according to four people familiar with the document. But officials then used a subpoena to obtain surveillance footage of the hallway outside a storage room at Mar-a-Lago and saw something that alarmed them. They also received information from at least one witness who indicated that more material might remain at the residence, people familiar with the investigation said.
ELLIOT WILLIAMS: Oh, my Lord! It’s like a law school exam question where you have to count all of the crimes. I’m dead serious here, because, number one, signing that document could itself be a crime. Because it’s a false statement to the government.
Number two, not complying with the subpoena is itself a, it’s a misdemeanor, but it’s still a crime.
Number three, what you’re seeing are potentially crimes, or at least gross abuses in judgment, happening on camera. And this happens all the time when building investigations, they had evidence and testimony and a background of what was going on and then were triggered by something they saw on camera that said, “Wait a second. Something doesn’t look right here.”
Watch above via CNN.
