FBI's Trump raid a 'bombshell' that will further divide the nation: Bret Baier
"Special Report" anchor reacts to the FBI's "unprecedented" raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home on "America Reports."
Former Kamala Harris aide Symone Sanders, now an MSNBC weekend host, pleaded with people to stop calling the FBI search of former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence a "raid" on Tuesday.
"Please folks stop calling it a ‘raid,’" she tweeted, later responding to critics in amusement.
Those words may have been directed at her fellow MSNBC hosts and producers, who used the "raid" language on the air often Monday evening.
"The FBI raided Donald Trump’s Florida home today on the 48th anniversary, today is the 48th anniversary of the day that Republican president Richard Nixon announced that he was resigning the presidency," anchor Lawrence O'Donnell said Monday.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump rally near his Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8, 2022, in Palm Beach, Florida. The FBI raided the home to retrieve classified White House documents. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
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Even former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo raised eyebrows on Twitter when he called on the Justice Department to justify the "raid" or else jeopardize other investigations like the one into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
MSNBC seemed to change tacks on Tuesday, with more hosts and reporters quoting Trump's "raid" language but mostly describing it as a search instead.
"Already the former president has called it a raid. And the veteran FBI officials telling us it’s more of a simple search, which is something they do routinely," reporter Kerry Sanders said on Tuesday.
Trump's statement about the FBI raid on Monday employed dramatic language as he declared his home was "under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents." The Secret Service allowed the FBI in to conduct its search, which Trump added was an "unannounced raid."
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to members of the press as press secretary Symone D. Sanders looks on, June 14, 2021, in Greer, South Carolina. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Sanders took heat from some conservatives and Republicans for her admonition.
"What is a woman? What is a recession? What is a raid?" Ted Cruz communications director Steve Guest asked mockingly.
Sanders isn't the only MSNBC personality to take exception to the term. As the news broke Monday, anchor Alicia Menendez asked former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi how the FBI was able to "pull off this raid." Figliuzzi, a national security contributor at MSNBC, objected to her terminology during his answer.
"Agents don’t like the word ‘raid,’ they don’t like it. It sounds like it’s some sort of extrajudicial, non-legal thing. It’s an execution of a search warrant. It’s a court-authorized search warrant," he said.
Many print outlets used the term "raid" independently of Trump, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, CNBC, Politico and others.
Sources told Fox News on Tuesday that investigators from the Justice Department visited Mar-a-Lago in June for a meeting about turning over records as part of an investigation into documents former President Trump allegedly took with him from the White House to his private residence when he left office in January 2021.
Trump's attorneys were present at that meeting and the sources say the former president himself stopped in to say hello for a few minutes.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Aug. 6, 2022, in Dallas, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The meeting came months after the National Archives — with assistance from the Justice Department — was able to get 15 boxes of documents sent back to Washington, D.C., after expressing concern they were in Florida.
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The June meeting was about additional documents that were being sought. But following it, the Justice Department and FBI felt they weren't getting the same cooperation they had been receiving earlier in the probe, according to a source with knowledge of negotiations between Trump's team and the federal entities.
The perceived lack of cooperation is why a search warrant was requested and ultimately executed on Monday, Aug. 8, at Trump's Palm Beach property.
Sanders resigned as a top aide to Harris last year and joined MSNBC, where she hosts the weekend program "Symone." She's been followed in that regard by former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who stepped down in May and will soon have her own Peacock streaming show.
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Fox News' David Spunt, Bill Mears and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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