and we agreed to cooperate. the search today is a full step in a thorough and timely doj process. we will continue to fully support and facilitate. we will have further information at the conclusion of today s search. now, it is not clear if the agents are looking for particular documents or more general classified documents, but to put all of this into perspective this comes, we learned the fbi searched the president s think tank in washington here in mid-november. that s after that initial discovery was made by the president s attorneys of the classified documents, which they turned over to the justice department. and, of course, we also know they searched his home in wilmington, delaware. there is a special counsel investigation into all of this. there is a special counsel investigation into former president trump s handling of classified material in that case. mar-a-lago was searched because he refused to turn over the documents. the white house continues to make that distinction.
surprised at the revelation that there were documents in his personal office. what he didn t do was saying anything about the documents that were later discovered in his garage. the white house says that they re being transparent, that they are playing this by the book, but, you know, there are questions out there that they are not being totally transparent in the moment, and instead they re letting this come out drip by drip. neil: yeah. even when you say you re ignorant about it, ignorance is no defense in the eyes of the law. we ll see how it sorts out. phil wegman, thank you very much. we have a former president, getting the special counsel treatment, and now a president-president getting the special counsel treatment, merrick garland essentially backed into a corner doing this. quote, i strongly blow that the normal process of this department can handle all investigations with integrity. goes on to say, but under the regulations, the extraordinary circumstances here, require t
if not thousands, of classified documents. first of all, you don t know, or you say you don t know exactly how many documents are involved. how would you know one way or another? how is that how they re defining it? the sheer volume of this, making this a lesser sin? they talk more about it in terms of the reaction. whereas trump and his team were fighting the archives and the fbi. they were saying they had a right to have this information, and they were once it was known it was down there and they wanted to dispute that there was any wrongdoing done, whereas officials here draw a contrast by saying, as soon as the president s personal attorneys realized that something bad happened in 2017, something did something that s potentially illegal, they notified the authorities. but something that has not been answered, and it was asked in the briefing today, and kind. just referred to, we ll get back to you at the end of this doj
that he can declassify documents, i don t know if that s accurate, if that extends to a vice president in that capacity, even a senator, a cabinet secretary, but as far as i know no one can just declassify something that s classified, can they? well, that s exactly right. i mean, there s a process that even the president of the united states needs to go through. it needs to be documented. it needs to have subject matter experts familiar with the content of the classified information to determine whether or not it s still relevant, and therefore should be classified. we can t take this lightly. i will say, however, there are a number of documents that i ve seen over the past eight years that were classified, and i d ask the question, why on earth is it classified? it sue e seemed to be more for
surrogates. when he would go out of town, who was watching the garage? and is it a setup satisfactory to protecting america s secrets? we don t know what this document is. it s possible we won t know, because it might be too classified, but officials here are just pointing us to this process playing out. something else i ll point out, they say they don t want to weigh in on the process. they want the doj process to play itself out. but at the same time they are preknowledge whying it by saying that they are confident it will be determined this was an inadvertent mishandling of information. both of those things seem to be in conflict with each other. we re not going to talk about. we are going to talk about it. it was inadvertent. neil? neil: peter, you raised this question moments ago, do we have a visitors log as we do for the white house at the president s home, because many more people, certainly family members and