BY JUDICIAL WATCH
Judicial Watch announced today that it received 477 pages of records pages from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that show top officials of the National Security Division discussing the political implications of Trump allowing CNN to use closed-circuit TV (CCTV) footage of the raid on his Mar-a-Lago home. The documents confirm that the Justice Department had asked that Mar-a-Lago CCTV be turned off before the raid.
Judicial Watch obtained the records in response to a September 2022 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed after the Justice Department failed to respond to an August 2022 request for records about the August 8, 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid ((Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice) (No. 1:22-cv-02884)).
In an August 17, 2022, email exchange, with the subject “CNN – Mar-a-Lago CCTV Footage,” a trial attorney with the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the National Security Division, whose name is redacted, writes to colleagues:
I just received a call from our case agents at FBI, and apparently the Bureau has been given a heads-up by CNN that CNN has CCTV [closed circuit television] footage from Mar-a-Lago (presumably of agents executing the search) that they may air as soon as tonight [Redacted]
I have no further info on what, specifically, CNN has. But [redacted]…
