HEIGHTENED THREATS
The calls from Republicans came amid reports that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned of increased threats to law enforcement emanating from social media platforms in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago search.
The FBI said in a statement that it is always concerned about threats to law enforcement and was working with other agencies to assess and respond to such threats, “which are reprehensible and dangerous”.
Republican Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent and prosecutor from Pennsylvania, said he was concerned about the safety of federal law enforcement officers amid such threats, adding “everybody needs to be calling for calm”.
He told CBS’ Face the Nation that the search of Trump’s home “was an unprecedented action that needs to be supported by unprecedented justification” and the probable-cause affidavit would show whether that standard was reached – even if it was only shown to lawmakers in a classified briefing.
“I’ve encouraged all my colleagues on the left and the right to reserve judgment and not get ahead of yourself because we don’t know what that document contains. It’s going answer a lot of questions.”
DAMAGE ASSESSMENT
Democrats on Sunday did not echo calls for the affidavit’s release.
Instead, Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said he was asking for an assessment of potential damage done to US national security from Trump’s possession of the classified documents, along with an intelligence briefing.
The “top secret” and “sensitive compartmented information” documents could cause “extremely grave damage to national security” if disclosed, Schiff told CBS.
“So the fact that they were in an unsecured place that is guarded with nothing more than a padlock, or whatever security they had at a hotel, is deeply alarming,” Schiff said.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told NBC that she could not make a judgment as to whether the Justice Department should indict Trump on criminal charges.
“This is going to be up to the Justice Department to make a decision about what happened here, why it happened, and if it rises to the level of a crime,” Klobuchar said.
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