CNN’s Evan Perez Points Out Trump Isn’t Taking Legal Action Over FBI Raid — Only ‘Michael Scott-Style Declarations’
CNN Senior Justice Correspondent Evan Perez noted an interesting development or lack thereof since Monday’s FBI raid at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate: there has been no formal litigation from the Trump team in response — solely angry posts on social media.
Since the raid on the former president’s Florida home — carried out to retrieve documents taken from the White House — Trump has made various excuses on his social media platform Truth Social to explain the incident, as well as express his outrage at what he believes is a politically charged federal law enforcement institution.
The former president has made numerous excuses for the raid, claiming that the material seized was planted by the FBI themselves, reporting of classified material stored at Mar-a-Lago was a “hoax,” that he has full authority to declassify any information without any processing, and even arguing that the Justice Department is biased because they did not go after former President Barack Obama.
Most recently, Trump has been claiming that some of the documents seized by the FBI fall under “privileged attorney-client material,” and “executive privileged material,” arguing that they “should not have been taken,” from the estate.
Generally, in a situation like this, Trump would not only claim that to be true, but he would also use his legal team to file litigation in opposition to the search and seizure.
Perez highlighted this lack of legal action made against the Justice Department by Trump and his team, saying it is “one of the things we’re waiting for and we’re frankly just astonished,” that there has been no “formal effort,” to “try and put some breaks” on the DOJ.
“What routinely happens in cases like this is they go to court,” continued the justice correspondent.
Normally, “you accuse the Justice Department of overreach and try to at least slow things down,” in order to give Trump “time to figure out how he’s going to defend himself,” and we have not seen any of that since last Monday.
“The only thing we’ve seen is this sort of Michael Scott-style declaration,” argued Perez, referencing a bit from NBC’s The Office.
Perez called the executive privilege argument “bizarre,” adding that it is possible that litigation could come in the future, “we just haven’t seen it yet.”
“It still may happen,” concluded Perez, adding “this is a case that probably still has a long way to go but they haven’t done it yet.”
