Cannot Retroactively Declassify Documents News Today

>> thanks so much. nice to see you. thanks for joining us. im christine romans. "new day" starts right now. ♪ it is something that has never happened before. at least not like this. the fbi searches the home of a former president. so, why? why would a federal judge agree there was probable cause a crime had been committed? what exactly were agents looking for? what is so urgent that merrick garland would sign off on this, assuming he did? im john berman here with brianna keilar. th...

Presented to this federal judge. it could be that some documents were destroyed. it could be something completely different. it could be that maybe theres some overlap between the materials he kept of january 6th, thats even possible. although theres no indication of that. but theres something here that made this quite, more than just somebody mistakenly accidentally, or carelessly packing 15 boxes of materials and sending them to mar-a-lago. his excuse is hey, im president of the united states,...

Why now go in. why not just cut a subpoena or ask nicely for the people at mar-a-lago, trumps lawyers, to turn over the records. and then theres the other question what the full shape of the investigation looks like. when you step back, there are laws that protect federal records things like the presidential records act. but the presidential records act is not the sort of thing that has any teeth that can bring about a criminal investigation, and especially, a search, of mar-a-lago. the presiden...

Letter to mar-a-lago saying you need to secure that room downstairs. they subsequently put a padlock on it. thats important for two reasons, two months ago the doj team saw things that concerned them to an extent they said put a lock on it. but its also important because it gave investigators an eye on the ground. gave them a chance to see where documents are stored and give an idea of the lay of the land. when you fast forward to yesterday, a lot of planning goes into that. the first thing you ...

Was taken, what they were looking for, at this point, saying no comment. brianna, john. >> all right, leyla, thank you so much, live for us from palm beach there outside of mar-a-lago. >> so what laws exactly are at play here? lets go to cnns senior justice and crime analyst for us katelyn polantz, what laws are we talking about? >> well, john, we heard a lot about the presidential records throughout the trump administration. lots of people have complained about the maintenance of documents. tha...

>> well, i mean, if there are classified documents there, or evidence of classified documents that were mishandled, mistreated or destroyed, you know, thats a very serious thing. people have gone to jail for that. and people have gotten convicted of that. and if he did it with a large number of documents, i think theres been some reporting that even the list of classified documents is long, and some of the documents may have been so sensitive that they couldnt actually describe the document with...

Assist tournament director pete strzok. hes the author of "compromise, counterintelligence and the threat of donald j. trump." peter, we know some things about this, right? we know there was some coordination ahead of time between the secret service and the fbi because there is a small secret service presence there. just walk us through how this would play out in mar-a-lago. >> absolutely. its really hard to understate the complexity and planning that goes into a search like this. lets step back...