letter to mar-a-lago saying you need to secure that room downstairs. they subsequently put a padlock on it. that s 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 it s 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 have to do is get the team in safely. of course, the secret service provides protection for all of where trump lives. he was up in new york. so the secret service presence was not quite as large. and they make sure everybody is safe. and you then once that team gets on the ground you have a number of moving pieces. you have first and foremost likely some filter team, a group of agents and investigators and probably attorneys who are looking to sort out that make sure any sort of privileged com
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? let s go to cnn s 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. that s not what we re talk about here, apparently. there s things that we know here but there are so many questions that still need to be answered. so, the things that we know, they removed documents and paper boxes when the fbi went in, this is pat of the handling of the classified records. some of the things we need to know questions like what were they looking for.
complications you already have in a criminal investigation that ropes in the president s home like this. john. a president can declassify documents. a former president cannot retroactively declassify documents. so if he didn t declassify them if they existed before he went to mar-a-lago, they were never declassified, katelyn polantz thank you so much for laying out laws here. i want to bring in attorney and contributing columnist at the washington post george conway. george, great to see you this morning. please, let s just take a step back. because this is so unusual. we haven t seen anything like this before, so when you heard that the fbi executed a search warrant at the home of the former president, what questions does tell raise for you? what standards in your mind, must have been met? well, obviously, it has to meet the basic standard of any search warrant, you have to show probable cause that a someone,
well, i mean, if there are classified documents there, or evidence of classified documents that were mishandled, mistreated or destroyed, you know, that s 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 there s been some reporting that even the list of classified documents is long, and some of the documents may have been so sensitive that they couldn t actually describe the document without making a list that was classified. this could be very serious materials with serious national security interests in jeopardy, because of donald trump s carelessness. or, worse. why should this be viewed, or should it not be viewed, as these doj probes encircling, or getting tighter, around donald trump? well, it absolutely it.
assist tournament director pete strzok. he s 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. it s really hard to understate the complexity and planning that goes into a search like this. let s step back to yesterday. cnn reported late last night, that in early june of this year, about two months ago, a team of investigators led by the head of doj s counterintelligence and expert control section went down mar-a-lago and met with trump s attorneys some indication that trump himself stepped in. during that meeting they walked into the area. they went down to the basement, apparently, where documents is stored. what s notable about this, seven days after that meeting, sent a