Cannot Retroactively Declassify Documents News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> thanks so much. nice to see you. thanks for joining us. i'm 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? i'm john berman here with brianna keilar. these are some of the questions we will try to answer this morning. admittedly, some of these questi...

Presented to this federal judge. it could be that some documents were destroyed. it could be something completely different. it could be that maybe there's some overlap between the materials he kept of january 6th, that's even possible. although there's no indication of that. but there's 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, i'm president of the united states, i didn't focus on this, i was busy. but what he was busy with is launching a coup. >> narrativ...

Why now go in. why not just cut a subpoena or ask nicely for the people at mar-a-lago, trump's lawyers, to turn over the records. and then there's 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 president's home, his beach club, in palm beach. so, we do often see lawsuits over the presidential record...

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...

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 ...