Host how are you funded . Guest we are funded by individual donors and foundations. Private donors of a wide variety. Host there is a lot of discussions about the information from maralago and the release of the information of the affidavit to the public. Where do you stand on how much information should come up . Guest i look at this both asked my current position as an crew and a former prosecutor. I have experience with educating executing search warrant. There have been a lot of information made public about the search. When there is a search, usually everything about it is kept secret secret. This is an extraordinary case. There has never been a search of a former president of the United States before. The department of justice petitioned and released the search warrant and the inventory of what they obtained. We are in a place where many things have been made public and the judge is making doing a good job of balancing the extraordinary nature of this entity interest in a significant Public Information about why this happened with the interests of the department of justice in preserving an ongoing criminal and for investigation. If you left everything you have, it makes it hard to do interviews and keep on investigating the case. Host because of your background, what does an affidavit do particularly when it comes with two maralago . Guest it is from a lead agent and it will set out the evidence that the government has obtained so far. It will say we are investigating these offenses and we talked to these people. Here is what we obtained. We have reason to believe these offenses may have been committed and is evidence this evidence exists in this location but it maintains things like the identity of people who have been spoken to and what they said and that can do a number of things. It can allow other potential witnesses to know everything up that is out there and both their stories mold their stories. We have seen threats to fbi agents and offices and people at the department of justice. We saw an armed person show up at the rpr office in cincinnati so the idea that you might put out the names of witnesses, you can put people in danger. There is a lot in that affidavit that is resilient as to what the reason was for the search but there is a lot that will cause pop that would cause problems if it were made public. Host we heard a judge saying if it wasnt released, it will be highly regarded. Is that unusual . Guest what we have seen what fee search with the search warrant itself and the inventory released, it is unusual. For the affidavit to be released, it is more unusual. That said, in situations where courts released documents that are in Public Interest related to ongoing investigations, it is common to heavily redacted them. At my organization, we are trying to get information about investigations and we have been fighting with the Justice Department about a memorandum that attorney general barr relied on when he said the Justice Department what it charged donald trump with obstruction would not charge donald trump with objection. Obstruction. Getting redacted information about investigations is not uncommon. In this context though, we are in uncharted territory. Host if you want to ask questions about the president ial records in the search, 202 7488001 for republicans, 202 7488000 or democrats, 202 7488002 or independents. Can a president automatically the client declassify information . Guest it is not a magic wand. You cant say everything i got is declassified. There is a process where the president can decide documents can be declassified and officials change the marking to declassified. There is something to that but it is not this idea that a president can have a blanket order that everything i touch is declassified, that is not how it works in my experience. It is not clear that a court would give that a lot of deference. Host how complicated the process is it . Guest i am not a national quote National Security classification is not my area of expertise but it is not a complicated process but it has to go through certain steps and that is the one of the things that the National Purity committee relies on Security Committee relies on. If you dont have that, it allows people to say that thing is classified is not classified and it becomes meaningless. In order to protect that information, that has to be some order to it. Host as of this morning, former President Trump asking for a special pastor to oversee the process. Any clarity on what this person could do . Guest in certain kinds of cases, it is not uncommon for a court to say, there is some material that could be problematic for prosecutors or the other side of the case to seat so we will bring someone from the outside to look at everything and make a judgment on who what you can see on what you can see. That happens in some frequency in cases where the attorneyclient privilege is an issue. There is documents that indicates what someone told their lawyer and prosecutes and the prosecutor can look at that and you cannot unsee it. It isnt clear if it is acting if it is at think that has been done in this context. Former President Trump is claiming executive privilege and it is not clear that this has been used in that context and there is no basis if the president can uses here. Use this here. The sense that i have gotten is there is not a clear basis on meeting a special master but having a special master goes through bunch of documents it is something that does happen and it is used. I havent seen a lot to suggest it is necessary. Host you have said that there has been information put out already from what was taken from maralago. From everything you have seen what is what is sure what is your concern about everything. Guest my level of concern is high. It is really important that records of a presidency be maintained in a way that is available to the American People. We need to know what happened and why decisions were made. The requirements under the law called the president ial records act that say that the records of the presidency needs a golf to the National Archives and when reporting came out last year earlier this year, that president ial records may have been destroyed on the way out and in that january 6 committee, there were doctrines that were ripped up and there was information that these records want to maralago and we wrote to the National Archives and department of justice sank you have to investigate. That is cause for concern. When you get there is classified information sitting in a basement of a public a private club, that is concerning. The topsecret information and you have secure information, that is very sensitive information. Even people with top secret clearance are not printed permitted to see and it could be dangerous if that is publicly the idea that it was there in maralago and it was not controlled the way it was supposed to be an efforts to get information back and donald trump and others continued to keep it there suggests a volatile situation, not to mention the records could be connected to other problematic conduct. Even the facts that they are there, is very concerning. Host richard calling from canada on the republican line. Guest caller i know it is on twitter that mr. Buchbinder 14 fbi whistleblowers went to how we dont see Noah Bookbinder tweeting about that, if those 14 fbi whistleblowers went about came out against the trunk, he would be ascetic. How come he stopped calling on the 14 fbi whistleblowers host thanks for the call. I went to establish we are a Nonpartisan Organization and in my experience and in my organizations experience, donald trump and his presidency exhibited a level of corruption and contempt for a system of democracy that we had not seen in previously previous administrations. We have folks on our board core democrats and republicans and we have gone after. From democrats and republicans and we dont go at things at a partisan angle. There is a lot to be concerned about with donald we had really pushed for more transparency in Law Enforcement agencies. We have been very concerned about text disappearing from service. We have been pretty hard over the years on the fbi and the department of justice. There have been at times, very valid criticism. I do not think the that impacts one way or the other, the fact that there is a lot to be concerned about with Donald Trumps conduct throughout his presidency but certainly around the efforts to overturn a fair and free election and the events surrounding january 6. Host from ohio, democrat line. Larry, you are next step. Caller i wanted to make a comment. What i want to say is the president controls everyones security clearance. If he has a problem with democrats, republicans, independents, he should just take the it would solve the whole problem. Guest you are right that under the law, ultimately, security clearances under the control of the president. I think there as with Law Enforcement, National Security and security clearance is something that should never be used politically and you never want to do anything that creates the appearance that it is being used politically. I think president s have tended to be very careful about not going around and taking security clearance away from large numbers of the. It is something you need to be careful with. Ultimately, if it comes out the individual officials or employees are a risk to National Security, that kind of action is appropriate. It is something that you want to treat in careful and considered way. Host have other president s taken documents from the white house to their personal location . Guest certainly not on this kind of scale. I know there have been incidents of individual documents that may have made their way. There was a lot of talk in the aftermath of the search about President Biden president obama taking millions of documents to chicago. That was different entirely. What happened is under the control of the National Archives, who were in charge in millions of documents, millions were moved to the obama president ial library. That was done in accordance with the law and how the law mandates this kind of thing be done. It was done under the supervision of the national archive, just the way president bush and others before them have done. It is not a partisan thing. This idea of boxes of documents, hundreds of highly classified documents going to a president ial resident, we have never seen anything like this. Host do you think the fbi handled the gaining of this material in the proper way . Guest the fbi went to a judge. They got approval as required by the law. Certainly, my experience as a prosecutor, sir search warrants are generally not taken lightly at the federal level. They go through levels of review because this tilt with a former president , they levels of review went much higher than they normally would. The attorney general himself approved this. This is not something the doj can do on its own. It has to go to a judge who looks at law and the facts. Certainly, everything we have seen to this point, it appears everything was done properly. I do not think this kind of search should be taken lightly. Any kind of action involving a former president is going to be construed politically as this one has been. Whether there was anything political about this or not. It should only be done if there was a real need and that is going to be either a serious terminal investigation or a real National Security risk posed by documents out there. We do not get no a whole lot about this one but from everything we have seen, it appears from what i have seen, it appears it has been done properly. I recognize there are ace a ton of feelings about this. Host john, republican line. Caller i would like to say good morning to the listening audience and cspan is wonderful. I wanted to ask mr. Noah bookbinder a couple questions. First, he witnessed the raid by the fbi. A lot of guys and the personnel have these bags or backpacks. Can mr. Noah bookbinder, if he knows, what was in these bags that they were carrying in . These bags they had on their backs. What was in them and could you please define democracy . That seems to be under attack when you are repeatedly saying this. I look forward to your answer. Host guest thanks, those are good questions. I would say first that i do not have any personal knowledge of what was in any of those bags. I can only speculate. The kinds of things that agents might have could be equipment for handling documents and materials. There can be gloves, there could be other kinds of things used to pick things up and store things. There could well be papers that are relevant. They may have copies of the search warrant. They might have their own kind of notes or things like that. I do not truly know what they had. But, i am just talking about the kinds of things that agents would often carry with them. In terms of what is democracy . That is a great question and certainly something we could spend the rest of the hour talking about. At its base, democracy is a form of government where the people ultimately decide who is in charge. A true democracy would actually be the people deciding everything that is done through popular vote. We have a republican form of democracy where the people elect representatives. And, where people vote and the result of that boat determined who is in charge. And we respect that vote and have peaceful transitions of power from one elected president or set of elected members of congress or the position whatever the position is or the next. That is really the key. Free and fair and meaningful elections. I think, that certainly when a whole lot of money gets involved from a small number of people, that makes our country less democratic. And, when there is an effort to disregard the result of free and fair elections, that is really weapons our democracy under a very direct threat. Host carter in albany, georgia, independent line. Caller i think if they are going i would refine the information trump would put there. And then him and his kids, they probably have the papers everywhere. Host you mention the president ial records act. What happens to a person who violates that . Guest a lot of what the president ial records act has is procedures and requirements that is just support supposed to tell you what the best behavior is and the obligations. But, there are actually criminal provisions to the president ial records act. They are not often used to prosecute people because in general, most president s and people work within the executive branch and have tried their best to follow that law. But, you can have criminal charges and people are convicted. There are actually felony provisions. They are not usually a massive prison sentences that can come with it but it can result in probation and fines and in extraordinary circumstances with time in prison. There is a very unusual provision in the president ial records act that actually says that people who violates it are disqualified from future office. It is not at all clear whether that could apply to a president himself but it can apply to certainly some people who violate the law. It is a sign of the fact that when congress made that law, they took it really seriously. This is not just paperwork. This is about accountability for the people in charge of this country, of any party, and for history. Host you said we know a lot about everything about what is going on up today. Going back to your previous experiences, have you seen anything that would rise the level of charges under the president ial records act . Guest there have been a number of situations actually involving that have led to at least some charges because they have had classified documents involved. But, David Petraeus was one example. Have been cases of documents making their way out of where they are supposed to be, for various personal purposes. That is one piece of that. Where broadly, there certainly have been more broadly, there certainly have been in a number of administrations questions about whether people are observing the records they are supposed to. I think we saw it in much more extreme form in the trump administration. Certainly the idea of trying to keep conversations secret is something we have seen before and goes all the way back to Richard Nixon and watergate which is what led to a lot of transparency laws. I think most administrations have tried to, for the most part , comply with the law but we have seen incidences of really resisting transparency. Host is it the attorney general who would make the charges if it came to that . Guest in most cases, it would be someone below the attorney general. A u. S. Attorney in a specific district or an assistant attorney general. If it were to be the president himself or senior aides to the president , it would almost certainly be the attorney general would make that decision. Host Noah Bookbinder is with the citizens for responsibility and ethics in washington. From the mississippi, democrats line. Hello. Caller my thing is, and listen to all the networks and i have heard ingram say it is time to move the page on donald trump. Wherever he goes, there is nothing but trouble and that is my comment. Host a couple of things with that. Guest one is that i think there can be some problems with the idea that we sort of need to turn the page and not look back on what happened previously. I think everybody is eager to move on and tackle the problems of today and not worry about what happened that happens a couple years ago. But, if you do not have accountability for things done wrong in the past, you can have real loss of faith in our system from the American People who see people can get away with things and nothing happens to them. And there can be risk of the same people doing the same things again. I think accountability is important. I do think that because donald trump was involved in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election, there are certainly questions about who did what, but that is uncontroverted in many ways at this point. He should not be in a position to do that again. It is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with specific policies or electing republicans or democrats. We should not have people in positions of power who seek to overturn the key tenets of our democracy. Host ohio in chesterfield, republican line. This is david. Caller hello. I am from ohio. I am a little bit irked about what i heard mr. Noah bookbinder when he claimed to be nonpartisan. I heard of chuck to see what peoples backgrounds are on the internet and it does not appear that he is nonpartisan as he appears to be. That is another story. I checked on influence watch md claims to be nonpartisan but watch and he claims to be nonpartisan but it looks like he is pushing democratic, leftwing ideals. My question is there must be somebody that checks the records and who is looking at them and how many i am missing. Assuming that somebody checks to see which records are missing and how many of these things are missing. I guess that is my question. Guest first of all, i want to make clear that our organization is a Nonpartisan Organization. We do not ever tell people who to vote for or not to vote for in elections. We have people on our staff and on our board who have worked for or been democrats in the past. And we have people who have worked for or been republican. And, you can check into that all you want. We have gone after democrats and republicans but we are very open about the positions that we take. We certainly try our very best to keep track of president ial records and federal records and to act when there are any that appear to not be treated appropriately. Obviously, there are millions and millions of such records. And, you can watch the rest of this program if you go to our website. We will take you live at the un security council. Intna