MSNBC national security analyst Frank Figliuzzi said Tuesday on “Deadline” that he believed it was surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago that caused the Department of Justice to have the FBI raid former President Donald Trump’s estate.
Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “The New York Times reports this bombshell about those 15 boxes. They write, quote, ‘Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts before turning them over. The Times goes on to report that the way Trump and his staff handled the documents is one of the key focuses of the DOJ’s criminal probe. They write this, ‘On June 22nd, the Justice Department subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage, which included a well-trafficked hallway outside the storage area while much of the footage showed hours of club employees walking through the busy corridor, some of it raised concerns for investigators. That’s according to people familiar with it. It revealed people moving boxes in and out, and in some cases appearing to change the contain containers some of the documents were held in.'”
Figliuzzi said, “So, for those of us sitting at home trying to figure out what was the switch that flipped and got them to the search warrant? What was it that happened, and I think it’s a myriad of things. There are human sources because we know from filings there’s references repeatedly to witnesses who have been interviewed, so that’s great, but I think one of those so-called witnesses was the surveillance camera footage. I think what they saw was, you know, no surprise here, that they couldn’t trust Trump. By that, I mean by then, a couple of locks had been slapped on the storage room door, right? So, everything’s supposed to be fine. While we continued to nicely, civilly discuss and negotiate whatever’s going to happen. And lo and behold, what do they see on the surveillance camera? Allegedly people coming in and out of the storage room that’s supposed to be extra secure now and even reportedly changing boxes, changing the boxes, the containers in which the documents may be sitting.”
He added, “So, that gets us, Nicolle, into this whole issue of why were they charging falsification and destruction or masking of evidence? Well, that’s part of it, I think. It’s not just the Trump lawyer who filed a form saying, ‘You’ve got everything. We gave you everything. There’s no more.’ It’s also, I think, the storage room surveillance footage that says — no, darn it, they’re not securing the room. And by the way, they seem to be moving stuff out. And by the way, they seem to be changing the containers that documents may be in. There’s that going on here as well. We can see where they’re getting to the statute. The statutory elements may have been met. We can see what may have flipped the switch in part to get to a search warrant.”
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