Andrew McCarthy Notes FBI Repeatedly Tried to Get ‘Top Super Duper Secret’ Docs Back From Trump When Asked on Fox if Raid Justified

Fox News legal analyst Andrew McCarthy weighed in on Friday after the Department of Justice’s affidavit supporting the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate was made public – although redacted.

The discussion began with anchor Martha MacCallum asking McCarthy what new information “can we glean” from the unsealing of the redacted affidavit.

McCarthy responded, “The archivist letter, Martha, talks about not only the highly classified, top secret, sensitive, compartmentalized information. They also point out that a number of the documents were special access program, which is like the top super duper secret stuff. And they the archives stressed that, but in particular, the Justice Department stressed that.”

“And what they pointed out here, and this is why I keep going back to whether do they really want to prosecute Trump here or do they just want their stuff back?” McCarthy continued, adding:

What they say is that and this is true when a top-secret classified document has potentially fallen into the wrong hands, they have to do a thoroughgoing damage assessment to figure out, do we have informants who are at risk?

“Yeah, but Andy, you know, before I let you go, if that were the case, right, is the raid itself merited?” MacCallum then asked.

“Well, Martha, I think what they would say in response to that is, look, we met with them a number of times. We couldn’t have stressed more how important it was that we get this information back,” McCarthy responded, before laying out in detail the numerous steps the FBI took to retain the documents.

“We tried to get the FBI to be able to do this damage assessment. And President Trump continually tried to block the FBI, which is what they say,” he continued, adding the various steps the FBI says they took:

We tried issuing grand jury subpoenas.

We went down there and we met with them and they represented to us that we had everything back, at least that was more classified.

And then obviously, we had reason to believe that the thing that they still maintain, things that were more classified. And we were finally at a point of saying, ‘If we don’t go in and take this stuff, we may never get it back.’

And we have serious concern that there was very highly classified information, which is not being secured in a way that we can be confident that the national security interest is preserved. So I think that’s their argument.

Watch the full clip above via Fox News