'They want to do witness tampering': Morning Joe busts Trump lawyers for push to reveal Mar-A-Lago sources
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough exposed the game Donald Trump's lawyers are trying to play by pressuring the Department of Justice to reveal their confidential sources.
News organizations have asked a court to unseal the affidavit used to justify an FBI search warrant for Mar-A-Lago, and the former president's lawyers have called on the Justice Department to reveal the names of witnesses who helped secure the warrant -- and the "Morning Joe" called out what they were planning to do.
"This is a president who has a history of witness intimidation," Scarborough said. "We saw it in the Jan. 6 hearing. Yeah, they're pushing, Trump's lawyers are pushing to get the name of potential witnesses, because, well, if the past it prologue, they want to do something that many people thinks resembles witness tampering."
New York Times reporter Peter Baker said he understood the DOJ's position on keeping the sources under seal for now, but he said the public had an interest in learning how the search was carried out at the former president's home.
"The reason from the filing you can understand from their point of view, their perspective, with that document, if they did release it they would have to redact it so heavily it would be a useless document for the public to understand," Baker said. "I'm not optimistic that it comes out and we get the answers we're looking for. If you're a witness against Donald Trump, he's going to figure it out eventually. The fact is, here we've got to override on the part of the public to understand what the former president was doing with documents that were sensitive like this in his home in Mar-A-Lago."
"What was the point of taking them?" Baker added. "What was the point of not returning when the lawyer said he had? What was he planning to do with them, and how did the government find out about them and what did the government know about the extent of this here, if they did know about it? I think those are important questions to answer."
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