'The Feds are just getting started': How Trump faces 'an entirely new situation'
On Thursday, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times took to Twitter to explain why the new FBI investigation former President Donald Trump faces is more serious than anything he's ever dealt with before — even his two impeachments.
"This is an entirely new situation," wrote Haberman. "It’s not clear where it leads, but DOJ was never going to indict a sitting president, Republicans were aligned with Trump during his first impeachment (he was out of office for the second and still most Senate Rs voted against)."
"Several Trump advisers have commented, 'we’ve been here before,'" Haberman added. "But these are different circumstances, even if the outcome is not clear."
Haberman's analysis came in response to a report from POLITICO that a key Justice Department official that the FBI investigation is just in its early stages.
"At Thursday’s proceedings, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, Jay Bratt, repeatedly emphasized that the investigation into the former president’s handling of classified White House records 'is in its early stages,'" said the report. "Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who authorized the search on Aug. 5, ordered prosecutors to propose redactions to the affidavit by next week, indicating that he was skeptical of the Justice Department’s arguments to keep those documents under seal. He set a deadline of next Thursday for prosecutors to propose redactions to the affidavit. 'I’m not prepared to find the affidavit should be fully sealed,' Reinhart said."
The investigation concerns boxes of highly classified documents that the former president took with him to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Among the documents the FBI searched for are reportedly some containing nuclear weapons secrets.