i've talked to a lot of people that don't get fired up. but they're fired up about this. closer to the election, it's about how they feel about the pocketbook and inflation and everything else. >> martha: thanks, bret. that is "the story," quite a story nor august 11. "the story" goes on. see you back here tomorrow at 3:00. "your world" starts right now. >> justice department has filed a motion in the southern district of florida to unseal a search warrant and property receipt relating to a court-approveder is thatch the fbi conducted earlier this week. that search was a promises located in florida belonging to the former president. >> charles: this afternoon, the doj breaking their silence on the mar-a-largo raid. attorney general mar-a-largo confirming there was a search

warrant. what happens next? welcome, everybody. i'm charles payne in for neil cavuto for "your world." we begin with david spunt at the justice department. david? >> i was in the room when merrick garland made those comments, history-making comment to see an attorney general talk about a search warrant that he authorized, the final person to sign off on the search warrant of a former president of the united states. i want to play some of what the attorney general said. listen. >> first, i personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter. second, the department does not take such a decision lightly. where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken. >> charles, for days attorney general garland and fbi

districter christopher wray have been under scrutiny for not coming out and speaking about this. attorney general merrick garland did today. he spoke a little under five minutes here at main justice headquarters. what he did, charles, he put the ball back in the hands of the former president's legal team. now the department of justice is saying we want to unseal the search warrant so everybody can see what is inside and see the items taken. now it's up to the trump legal team to object and say let's be transparent and do so. charles, this is a rapidly-moving story as you know. something else that many want to see including myself, including you, people want to see this affidavit. the affidavit will be the reason that the judge authorized and signed off on that search warrant. we could find that as soon as monday. right now the judge is considering a motion from some organizations that have sued to make some documents public.

so we could see that as soon as monday. as far as when the search warrant will be released right now, it's in the hands of the trump legal team. charles? >> charles: before you go a lot of speculation who in the administration and the justice department knew this was happening. the white house still has been tight-lipped. what do you make of the fact that garland came out and said number 1, i personally approved this. what was the importance of that? >> it's important to know that number 1 he is running the department of justice after all. it did come to him, a lot of speculation that he didn't approve it or didn't know about it. but he did. he's the chief law enforcement officer. christopher wray knew as well but it was merrick garland that approved it. the fbi is under the umbrella of the department of justice. charles? have. >> charles: thanks very much. jonathan serrie is standing by

live at mar-a-largo following reaction to a.g. garland speaking out. jonathan? >> hi there, charles. because it's so hot and humid, a handful of trump supporters were out hire. most come out in the evening. those that were here seemed to have a positive reaction to this latest development today. trump supporters do not like what happened here on monday, but the idea of monday transparency perhaps being able to get a glimpse of this search warrant and property receipt will shed more light on the thinking behind the federal government coming in and looking for these items at the resident of former president trump. i talked to one gentleman on camera moments ago. let's take a listen. >> i thinking they didn't expect the backlash that they had from everybody in the united states doing something so radical.

people are really mad. people are concerned. if they can do that to an incredible person like the ex-president, they can do it to you and me. >> are you glad these documents will be unsealed? would you like to see what is in them? >> 100%. we pay for the salaries. we need to see everything. >> so a sampling of some of the reaction from the limited number of supporters out here in the hot florida humid heat. as we go into the evening, i imagine if this night is like previous nights, we'll see more people out here with the trump banners and we may get an earful then. back to you, charles. >> charles: before i let you go, again, i'm sure we'll be coming back out to you more often. it was an amazing sight to see the impromptu swelling of support with the trucks, the flags and all the other trump supporters when this raid initially happened. is there a sense that this is

all politically driven? is anybody giving the government the benefit of the doubt down there? >> yeah, charles, this is something that we've been hearing from the trump supporters that have been out here all week. all week they have been telling us that they believe this is politically motivated. that the current administration is afraid of the prospects of former president trump running for a second term in the white hughes in 2024. >> charles: thanks very much. former president donald trump stating "my attorneys and representatives were cooperating fully and very good relationships had been established." joining me now, former u.s. assistant attorney, andy mccarthy and jonathan hu. andy, let's start with you. what do you make of the attorney general's decision to speak out now? >> a lot of it is driven by the

fact that there's so much criticism and speculation and also by the public statements that were made by president trump. i think what would probably most agitate the justice department is the fact that president trump made statements about the warrant. but it was always in his capacity to release the warrant. he could have publicized it himself. so what the justice department is in the position of doing here, we're not afraid to put it out. he could have put it out by now. what i think a lot of confusion is here that when we talk about the warrant, it's not really the warrant. there's a search warrant form which the judge signs off on and describe what's can be seized and then there's the underlying probable cause affidavit -- >> charles: hold on one second. i want to come back to you. for a moment, i want to go to bret and martha. they're standing by. you were covering this whole thing, martha, live, as the

words came out. bret, great to see you as well. so far, it's evolving quickly. what is standing out to you most. >> martha: i think michael mukasey hit the nail on the head. the question is why was it not possible to enter the trump home in a way that was less intrusive? that's the big question mark here. what was it that went from the former president has said was cooperative relationship to u.s. depply the need to get into the house in the dark of night when he wasn't home. that is a big question mark that hangs here. the other issue is learning more about this warrant and what is underlying affidavit. i think that's why you have so much unease over all of this. i think that is problematic as you're heading into an election and very problematic when you have a president at the end of the executive branch in which the doj operates in which is more than likely could be facing that same former president in

the next presidential election of the united states. so i think strikes people as very -- there's a lot of friction. peel would lake more separation and a lot more clarity on exactly what the information was and perhaps its substantial, that prompted them to make such an unprecedented move. >> charles: bret, what martha is talking about, when a.j. merrick garland said when possible to seek less intrusive means. why the urgency? why couldn't they go by standard practices? >> bret: good afternoon. i hate interrupting andy mccarthy. i wanted to let you know before i start. listen, this is the huge question. that timeline from june 3 when we know they receive a grand jury subpoena, the trump people said they're cooperating, they're having negotiations, they hand hover 15 boxes.

the justice department says you have to put an extra lock on this door where the other material is. lara trump it says it goes to that point from what we saw at mar-a-largo. the attorney general didn't fill in those blanks. what does? the search warrant and to andy's point, the affidavit more importantly about what was the probable cause to get there. now, in is what the doj says. they go from that to this. we don't know the in between. we also don't know whether the trump lawyers are going to object to the filing that is now in a south florida court to make public the search warrant and the list of documents taken. >> charles: probably that filing goes on to say involving thor issh of a resident of the former president, the court notices to unseal the filing and its attachments. a search warrant approved august 5, incluing attachments and

property seized. that might give us some information but doesn't get what everybody is really looking for, the initial sign off on this, the affidavit that led to the approval of the search in the first place. >> martha: exactly right. we'll see those documents. it will be very difficult to turn down the request to release those documents of the search warrant and the receipt, which is what they pulled out of the house. once again, charles, you have a situation where the underlying document and i think back to the fisa applications, you think back to even the dossier during the course of the russia investigation, which we're sort of all told, the evidence is there to take these very unprecedented actions. you just have to trust us on this. then you learn that there was information that went into all of those things that fell apart on closer scrutiny. so this is why we need to see

the affidavit, we need to have some level of confidence that there was every reason to go in the way they did. otherwise, you'll have a continuing of distrust. >> we have polls coming out at 6:00 p.m. one of them is right direction, wrong direction nor the country. 75% say we're going in the wrong direction. that is not helping. either side, that says we have to indict the former president. the other side says this is and overreach of government. it splits the country and still that wrong direction the is the feeling that people have. >> charles: ironically, this election is about reversing that trend. truth social, my attorneys and representatives were cooperating fully and very good relationships have been established. the government could have done whatever they wanted if we had it. they asked us to put an additional lock on a certain

area done. everything was fine. better than most previous presidents. without no warning, mar-a-largo was raided at 6:30 many by a very large number of agents and safe crackers. they got way ahead of themselves. crazy. bret, you know, again, the number of agents, the way it went down, breaking into safes. the narrative there is it feels like for lack of a better word, some sort of a fishing expedition. >> bret: look at the past of classified documents. you had president obama that took a ton of documents and said he was going to put them online. they're not online yet. you can't search them yesterday. nobody was breaking down a door. was it national securityish you'res at that level? we don't know. there's other examples. there's hillary clinton, sandy berger in the clinton years. how it was handled and the disparity is what conservatives

point to. that really ticks them off. they want to know why. on the flip side, the former presidents attorneys need to answer, are they and why haven't they put out the search warrant that they received and the list of documents. >> neil: to your point, the presidential records act was enacted in 1978 in the aftermath of the water gate scandal. there's never been a case in which a former commander-in-chief has been punished for violating the presidential records act. thanks. >> martha: thanks, charles. >> charles: back with us now, former u.s. assistant attorney, andy mccarthy and general john yu. andy, sorry to cut you off there. the drama around this is really amazing and we're trying to understand, it's the lay people including myself how this went down. >> yeah, i want to go back then to the last thing you said,

which i think is very important. the presidential records act, which there's been a lot of discussion about, is not a criminal statute. there's no criminal laws attached to it. the reason that is important is the only way you get a search warrant under federal law in criminal practice is you have to have evidence of a crime and probable cause that evidence of the crime will be found in the place that you want to search. so to my mind, if there isn't something highly, highly classified that, you know, was in mar-a-largo that shouldn't have been in mar-a-largo, that president trump knew the government wanted back and, you know, was somewhat reluctant to return, this is completely inexplicable to me. if this is narrowly about information for the federal government, they can't get a search warrant because he has government files doubt there.

this has to be about classified information. as president obama once said, you know, there's classified information and there's classified information. if it's stuff that is overclassified hand benign, that would be no reason to do what they did. so i assume the reason they're putting out the warrant is that it will be evidence that there's something highly classified at stake here. if there's not, they have a lot of explaining to do. >> charles: to obtain a criminal search record, the government has to identify items to be seized and the specific location of the item and three, the specific item is at that specific location at that precise moment. leading a lot of speculation as to how the fbi and how the justice department knew where to look and what to look for. there's speculation that it could be someone on the former president's security detail. >> there's speculation there was some confidential informant.

that would be in the information and the documents that are with the court and that might be -- the judge might want to protect it. i want to underscore here something. it's the fact that is classified information. the fact that it's presidential records, we're talking about a former president here. the reason why we're so cautious and the reason why he shouldn't be treated like an every day decision, we don't want to create bad incentives for future presidents. that's why attorney general merrick garland should be treading carefully. to treat a former president as a criminal, like a mafia boss to destroy records, that's the only circumstance that i could think would justify this kind of search. leads you to think that they're terrible prosecutors and terrible decision making going on at the justice department or looking for something involving january 6 and hope they find it by chance. >> neil: to that notion, john, the preamble to a.g. garland's

comments included comments about applying the law evenly, without favor, that everyone is entitled with even handedness of the law. felt like he sort of echoing what we heard from speaker pelosi earlier in the week that nobody is above the law. but we do to your point treat the president, former president and the presidential office with a certain level of -- is it respect? is that the word i'm looking for? >> we want to treat former presidents carefully. we want future presidents to be able to act with deliberation, with speed so they're not worrying about their legal liabilities. do you think president biden is going to be worried about how he acts and what kinds of documents he's going to keep and if he will be investigated? this is the dynamic we don't want to create.

we want to negotiate things fairly. we didn't see agents bust in on hillary clinton to see what classified information she had. we allowed her lawyers to produce them to the justice department. it is very, very strange that this happened, that you used 3 ho fbi agents to search a former president's house just to look for the location of classified documents, which it appears the justice department knew where they were, how many they were and they were under safe lock and key already. >> charles: lara trump was just on with martha. she talked about there could have been an informant. let's take a listen. >> sadly look at his white house. look at the number of people that were out for sabotage at all times. always have to look behind your back especially when your last name the trump. seems like there's always somebody out to get you. i don't know in particular that he's focused on this one. general sense of you got to look out for yourself. >> charles: andy, what do you

think of that? >> i wish i could say that is preposterous, but it's unfortunate the lesson of the last seven or eight years, i'd say. they have become very political. there was a time when i think the justice department and fbi could say you can trust us to do the right thing. in these politically fraught causes, they put their thumb on the scale in particular against president trump. john just ran through some of it. we could sit here and talk all day about some of the investigations that they have been through that turned out to be baseless. i would caution people that point to that chapter. i've been very critical of it myself. one of the big things that we're upset about in connection with the fisa abuse is that in fisa, everything is classified. we never get to check their work and see what they tell the judge, et cetera.

in the criminal justice system, the upside here is someone is checking your work. if they try to bring a case, we'll see this warrant. we may see it anyway in particular the underlying affidavit. you know, in the criminal justice system, we don't rely on them being honorable. we hope that people are honorable. but what the incentive to do the right thing in the criminal system is that at a certain point in time people are going to check your work. it's not just going to the court. there's defense lawyers pouring over this. if they have engaged in bad conduct, we'll find out about it. >> charles: gentleman, i want your reaction from the attorney general. take a listen. >> faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedroom principle of the justice department and of our democracy. upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly without fear or favor. under my watch, that is precisely what the justice

department is doing. >> charles: john, your thoughts there. >> the rule of law in our country depends -- i agree with what andy said. we have faith that our prosecutors, our fbi agents, are enforcing the law fairly. most people in this country follow the law, most of the time. we don't have enough agents and prosecutors to watch everybody and find every infringement of law every day. we're a law-abiding people. the problem with what's going on here, people are losing faith in the rule of law when they seem to see these prosecutions and investigations that seem politically motivated like the russia hoax and this president of president trump that is being treated the way no previous president has ever suffered before. he may have some classified documents. there he may not. the way we've handled it in the

past has been to negotiate their handover in a peaceful way. we never had to use a search party of 30 agents to bust in on a former president's house to look for these kinds of violations of the law. that's what makes people question the rule of law in the hands of this current justice department. >> charles: to that point, john, it has folks saying maybe these national archive documents were the pretense to go in. once they're in the home, if they find evidence of any other crime, obviously that's fair game as well, isn't it? >> andy and i were both justice department officials. andy has more experience with search warrants than i do. i've worked on them, too. we would i think never have used this kind of method to try to follow up on a violation for a document. you know, the mishandling of domments. we've seen in before. it's never been treated in this manner.

>> charles: andy, a.g. garland said trump's counsel was on site during this raise. does that make a difference here? >> it could make a marginal difference. i would have told the fbi agents not to engage the defense lawyer. the way this works, if the agents know that a suspect is represented by counsel, they're not supposed to question that person. they're supposed to go through the lawyer. when i was a prosecutor, i would say if the defense lawyer has a question, give them my phone number and they can call me. they're not there to question -- i heard there were some complaints that the fbi agents wouldn't answer the lawyer's question. if i could do it, i would have allowed the agents to answer the questions either. they're able to be there. they can witness it to an extent, charles. the thing is here, this is like a national security issue.

apparently there's classified information issues. i don't know if the lawyer that there was has a security clearance, if he or she didn't, that would be an issue nor the agents. it's more complicated than just whether the person is there or not. whether the lawyer is there or not. >> charles: got you. you both have made amade incredible points. thanks, andy, john. we'll come back to you. so stand tight. right now the white house is saying that it was not given advanced notice of attorney general merrick garland's remarks and won't make comments on his remarks. i want to go to jacqui heinrich in south carolina right now traveling with the president. jacqui? >> hi, charles. yeah, if anyone wanted to know what the white house is saying about this, they won't deliver that. they want to stay as far as way from this as possible. not just saying they're going to give a reaction but letting us know that they found out about garland's remarks in the media. they want to make sure that people understand that there is

no coordination between the white house and the doj and that's what they're trying to evoke here. to allay fears of any political influence over this investigation. what is notable, this is a bit of a difference with how the white house handled the discussion about trump in the past. in a briefing this week, i noticed the wide house shied away from questions surrounding trump after news of the raid came out. in the past, they welcomed those kinds of questions. they seek to compare biden to his predecessor in a favorable light for biden. since news of the raid, they don't want to talk trump at all. >> do you consider donald trump to be a political rival of president biden? >> i'm not going to speak about that from here. >> you talk about trump all the time. do you -- >> i don't talk about trump all the time. >> the white house is sensitive to any appearance of political interference. kate bettingfield said the department of justice is

independent, in a dig to trump. the doj is not the president's personal lawyer and makes decisions independent from the white house. something that president biden has set to make clear since he appointed garland. >> more than anything, we need to restore the honor, the integrity, the independence of the department of justice in this nation. it's been so badly damaged. he embodied honor, fidelity to the rule of law and judicial independence. to those same traits, he will now bring as attorney general to the united states not as a personal attorney to the president, but as the people's lawyer. >> so perhaps unsurprisingly, house republicans are not necessarily convinced though. they read into merrick garland's statement that he personally signed off on the search warrant

as saying that it creates more questions than answers. they want to know does signed off mean that he actively directed it or did he just allow it to happen and not stop it down or intervene. they say the fact that he admitted that he signed off has created questions among white house republicans about his decision making involvement. beyond that, they're skeptical of garland overall. many see him as a political person and harken back to that scuffle among the teachers. they point to the white house and doj having discussions about investigating parents who are protesting critical race theory in schools and investigating possible domestic terrorism as a sign that there's been some level of political influence over the justice department in the past. that's the view from house republicans, so at this point they did not hear enough from garland to be assuaded from

political influence. >> and now here's aishah hasnie. >> the white house has tried to avoid this topic, stay as far away. chuck schumer said he didn't want to comment about it until he knew more information. now he has more information and we still haven't seen any comments from him. speaker pelosi has only really said that this proved no person is above the law. but then waved off question about the raid and still wait fog-reaction from her on the comments from attorney general garland. leadership really has been largely avoiding this topic. just starting to see a few tweets come in from some of the members like virginia democrat

congressman don buyer. if we can pull that tweet up. the justice department's motion to unseal the warrant is a key step to put the facts before the public. the ball is now squarely in donald trump's court. on the other side of the aisle here, senator lindsey graham who has been very vocal about this raid tweeted this. the primary reason the attorney general and fbi are being pushed to disclose why the search was necessary is because of the deep distrust of the fbi and doj when it comes to all things trump such as the crossfire hurricane and mueller investigations. whether democrats like it or not, charles, republicans are making this raid a mid-term issue. graham has already said that the likelihood of the former president getting re-elected is greater today than it was yesterday. the likelihood of him getting the nomination is greater today than yesterday. some republicans have been

encouraging the president to decide or announce a bid for the white house sooner rather than later. absolutely before the november mid-terms because they believe that he could really help them campaign and win the house, flip the house. they can start investigating the doj particularly which they accused of being politicized by democrats. the hill, a hill reporter, actually asked speaker pelosi if she thought that this raid would be detrimental, have a negative impact on the democrats in november. she answered no. she pointed out the stakes couldn't be higher in this moment. republicans really have been poised to take back the house, although in recent weeks with a streak, a series of democratic wins, those wins have been shifting more in the democrat's

favor. so perhaps that is the reason why we're seeing leadership at least sort of stay away from this even after the a.g. has spoken and unsealed this search warrant. we still have not yet seen really any comments or statements from democratic leadership. charles? >> charles: thanks very much. let's get to the political fallout with "the washington examiner"'s byron york. feels like the equivalent of a political nuclear bomb and this mushroom cloud gets larger and larger by the moment. what are you seeing here? what are you making of it so far? >> well, this afternoon, we know a little more about this than this morning but still haven't answered the big question. there's this sense of disproportion between the tactic that the fbi used, this unprecedented raid on a former president's house, never been happened in u.s. history, a big,

big deal. the disproportion between that tactic and a document handling case. why did it come to that? we still don't know why the fbi decided that that was necessary when they apparently had been having cordial and productive relations with the trip team up to there. the other thing we don't know, is there zero connection between this case and the other justice department investigation of president trump, which is the january 6 case. we know that there's a grand jury in washington, that they have interviewed some of former top trump officials like pat cipollone, the former white house counsel. is that really totally disconnected from this case? there's so much we just don't know right now. >> charles: that leaves open speculation, that this was done under false pretense, that this was the only way to get into the

home of president trump, former president trump. the j-6 committee has gone on and on and on. there's not been any smoking gun. maybe this was a last ditch -- this is what people are thinking, this is a last ditch effort to try to find something, a last gasp particularly before the mid-terms? >> well, christina bobb, the trump lauer in palm beach and saw the search warrant said nothing about january 6. it was all about this document case. but you're right. speculation about that does flourish. >> charles: byron, once you get into the home and you know what you're looking for and you know where it is, but you spend hours the president trump's private office, you go through melania trump's wardrobe, doesn't it sounds like a fishing

expedition? >> the search warrant gets you in the door. and then there's a lot of cases about picking up evidence with unrelated activities. that's an issue here. we know that the fbi in this case like in a lot of other cases were not too discriminating about what they picked up. they stuff out and they'll have to go through it later. so you're absolutely right about that. it's really weird. you do have -- you did have a grand jury in washington looking into this documents case. a separate grand jury in washington looking in to the january 6 case as far as it concerned president trump. so there's a at least two investigations of president trump right now. >> charles: we saw the ground swell of support instantaneous. people grabbed their flags, got in their trucks and sort of --

this, by the way, is on the heels of a lot of wins for president trump endorsed candidates across this country. it feels like this has blown a great breath of air, a gale wind, in to the sails of potential candidate trump. the question is would it be wise if he were going to take advantage of this to announce before the mid-terms? some people believe it would be a detriment. >> i'm not a political strategist here. most think it's unwise for him to do it before the mid-terms. certainly not in this cloud of events right now. the outpouring of support for president trump over this particular issue, the raid, is entirely understandable. for trump supporters, the fbi's behavior fits into a pattern of what is unfair treatment of president trump in 2017, 2018, 2019, of the justice department,

the fbi and the intelligence community, congress. the media. just everybody being out to get trump. so they saw that. now they see what has happened at mar-a-largo and they believe that it fits in to that pattern. so of course, they're going to add another measure of support for president trump. >> charles: byron, thanks very much. attorney general merrick garland making an attempt to defend the fbi men and personnel. take a listen. >> the men and women of the fbi are patriotic public servants. every day they protect the american people from violent crime, terrorism and other threats to their safety while safeguarding our civil rights. they to so at great personal sacrifice and risk to

themselves. >> charles: chris swecker joins us now. he's on the phone with more on this. chris, your thoughts on that part of the statement. >> yeah, i think that is something that he needed to do. he missed the point completely. people like myself and my colleagues have said, hey, it's not the agents on the ground. it's the leadership at the department of justice. it seemed to me he's passing the buck over. oh, they're good people. they are good people. i spent 24 years in the fbi. they're great people. the rank and file want to do the right thing. the question is how they're led. i will take issue with the production of the search warrant. that could have been done very differently. that's not the call of the agents on the ground. those things are planned at a higher level. charles, i'm glad he stuck up for the fbi and the fbi agents

on the ground. i think he was passing the buck. >> charles: the fbi has been under tremendous amount of negative publicity for a long time, going on many years now. to your point, it's for the most part the american public has been frustrated with leadership. the notion that they want from this agency that looked after all americans to becoming a more of a political tool. i just don't know this will help their cause. >> no. i traveled in circles that involved judges, and police chiefs and lawyers and a lot of regular people and former fbi colleagues. i have gotten literally dozens, scores of calls and e-mails from people that ordinarily will always support and respect the fbi. now they're questioning me and saying hey, what's going on over there? you know, really comes to a matter of when will the fbi push back at the department of

justice. the doj, they do report to doj. if you look at the backdrop of crossfire hurricane and all of the misfires there that are well-documented and inspector general reports across the board and how hillary clinton was handling with kid gloves, 33,000 e-mails and all they said is mother may i look at though e-mails. you can review them first before we see them. the contrast, hunter biden the same thing. the evidence starts to mount that they're under tremendous political pressure from the doj or we have ideologs at the fbi. i don't think that is necessarily the case at the fbi. >> charles: let me ask you the notion of an informant. there's some speculation saying at mar-a-largo, president trump is surrounded by political loyalists, law enforcement and the secret service. only law enforcement would have had a legal duty to observer is

vaccinations of criminal conduct. i always thought the secret service folks that protect the president and the president's family, not necessarily sworn to secrecy, but be hard to do your job if you felt they were looking over your shoulder. it would have to be something egregious for them to park this sort of complaint for them? >> it really world. let me say this. i don't think you can get a search warrant look hit the without one or more confidential informants. there were at least twos confidential informants. how would know know where it was. whether it was a secret service agent or someone else that had access to these areas, i doubt very seriously if it was a secret service agent. i dealt with them over the years. i they have a lot of pride in protecting their protectee in

every way possible. i will confirm, i think it's a 99.9% there were confidential informants that were part of this and probably the core of the probable cause. >> charles: where does this do from here? the department of justice that is under siege from the political and public image is concerned, do we need new leadership? there was a sense that maybe new leadership in the past was going to change everything. maybe they made it worse. where does it go from here? >> yeah, the fbi especially -- i'll speak from my personal perspective. they depend on the confidence of the general public. up till the comey era, the confidence was extremely high. i don't think anybody will dispute that. then it came in to question when

jim coney started to drive the fbi into politics. i don't think that they've been able to extricate themselves. something traumatic has to happen to make that happen. even if donald trump's attorneys were object -- obstinate, they should keep the public confidence and keep the fbi out of the perception that they're political, that they're a political weapon. >> charles: chris, thanks very much. more reaction to what donald trump has been saying after the attorney general's statement as we await the release of that warrant next.

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>> charles: i want to go back to the justice department. david spunt is there and attorney general's response today. david? >> charles, good to be back with you. it's extraordinary to hear the attorney general come out and boldly say that he ordered -- he

put in the order to go ahid and applied for the search warrant. he said it's on me. the attorney general does not speak about investigations but in this case he said it was the public interest. as you played before we went to break, he praised the rank and file of the fbi, the people that work at the department of justice and law enforcement who have been criticized heavily over the past week. i want to read an e-mail. it was written by fbi director christopher wray sent to fbi agents in all 56 field offices across the country. he says in part, our focus must remain as always on our mission and on doing the right thing in the right way no matter how loud the noise gets. let me also assure you that your safety and security are my primary concern. security division is working across the agency as we continue to stay vigilant and adjust

accordingly. we know that fbi director christopher wray knew about this before it happened on monday. same thing with attorney general merrick garland. ultimately the department of justice oversees the fbi as chris swecker just said. that's why we heard attorney general merrick garland come out. and a little while as, the a.d. came to mention that the search warrant that doj is asking to unseal is different than the affidavit. the affidavit won't be unsealed per doj's request. they're just asking for the search warrant to be unsealed. the search warrant there have information on it, but it's the affidavit that will give a specific reason that the judge in florida signed off and said okay, let me put my name on this and have the agents go inside and collect what we need to

collect. >> charles: thanks, david. i want to go to law professor jonathan turley. he joins me on the phone. so jonathan, i saw you on earlier with martha. you've had more time to look into this. what are your thoughts right now? >> well, there's still mounting questions that have been left unanswered even after the attorney general spoke. in fact, some of those questions seem even more poignant. he did knock down the news week story that he did not approve this raid. many of us have speculated that he might be able to do that. he did not address any of the other collateral questions. immediately when he spoke, a number of us sort of threw a flag on the play when he said we would release the warrant and itemized list of secured material. the warrant will answer a few

weeks, but largely confirm what we know as to the basis of the search. at least what has been reported. it's really the affidavit that is the core information that we've acquired. there's some aspects of this account that don't make sense. someone is obviously lying. the trump team is saying that they did not hear from the fbi after the june meeting. they agreed to secure the storage area as they requested. clearly the fbi must have told the court that this was a matter of some urgency. either that the materials could be destroyed or could be stolen by foreign powers. that leads the question, did the fbi actually tell the former president, we believe you have these classified items. they need to be turned over now or we will use a subpoena or even a search. it's hard to believe the trump team just told them to pound

sand. if they did, it would be in that affidavit. it appears that we're not going to see this. >> charles: to that point, when a.g. garland said -- i'm going to paraphrase here, when possible, it's standard practice to seek less intrusive means, that's an admission that there may have been alternatives. what was the sense of urgency and why was it not possible to seek as a standard practice less intrusive means to obtaining these documents? >> charles, that's what really left a lot of us scratching our heads. the attorney general said there was no other possible alternative. there were no other less intrusive means. on to top of my head, i can think of a lot of them. one would be a second subpoena. if you had the identify material and you knew where the material is, you could issue a second

subpoena since the first one produced the 15 boxes. you could have done this raid without dozens of federal law officers. you could have found a lower profile way of making it clear to the trump team that they must turn it over. the trump people are saying, they received no notice, no demand after the june meeting. so that's why we're left with these rather odd questions as the necessity of the raid, and also what transpired between june and the raid. this was a went to defcon 5 and we still don't understand why the attorney general saw no alternative but to order they agents to descend on mar-a-largo. >> charles: thanks, jonathan. great questions. we're waiting for the answers. back with us now, fox news contributor, former assistant u.s. attorney, andy mccarthy along with general john yoo.

john, you've had some more time, you brought up amating points here. again, it just -- from outside the political sphere, it just feels like a politically driven sense of let's knock president trump down a few pegs. feels like it's an i don't know going effort from the january 6 committee, all of the things he wept through as president of the united states and feels more public relations oriented than something that is truly a criminal investigation endeavor. >> i hate to say this, charles, but this is the kind of things that sometimes the justice department does to people like mafia leaders, drug cartel leaders, people they want to make an example of. maybe they're setting down a flag for some future confrontations that they expect to have with president trump. perhaps they want to have a deterrent open other people in trump world. they think they might have

fights with. it seems like an overreaction to use this kind of search that you wonder maybe they're trying to prepare the ground for a future fight and tell president trump don't mess with the justice department and the fbi with the way you dealt with people in the past. they're playing hardball now. i don't think that is the way we should be treating former presidents. >> charles: andy, professor turley said why didn't they just issue another subpoena? that is simple. why this draconian pivot? >> i want to try to answer my friend jonathan turley's question. what happened between june and now. i think the answer is that this is mainly about january 6. the classify information stuff and the records stuff is a fig leaf. if i could run through what happened since june. at the end of june, they did

search warrants on two lawyers that have been tied to the january 6th events. jeffery clark who was a former justice department official and john eastman who was president trump's private attorney who was a constitutional law professor. a week ago they gave grand jury subpoenas to two trump white house counsels office personnel, pat cipollone, the chief white house counsel and his deputy patrick philbin. the day after they searched mar-a-largo, they gave a search warrant and stopped on the street a member of congress, congressman scott perry, in pennsylvania. they stopped him on the street, gave him a search warrant and took his phone. so, you know, if people want to speculate that this is just about classified information and just about records and it's got absolutely nothing to do with january 6 under circumstances where it's obvious that they're trying to make a january 6 case,

trying to build a january 6 case and that trump is the big kahuna for them, that's a naive way to look at it. >> charles: less than a minute to go. at some point, this does come to some sort of conclusion. >> it does, maybe it's at the end of the hearings. maybe there's never going to be and indictment. maybe there will be. is it really worth to get trump on classified information or maybe january 6 and destroy american's faith in the rule of law? you asked about our faith in prosecutors and fbi agents. that's the price that society is paying for this. >> charles: andy, john, thanks so much. so important on this day to have you. thank you. before we leave, we have an update on that standoff with the suspect who attacked a cincinnati field office this morning. garrett tenney joins us with the

latest. garrett? >> we just got word from the county emergency management agency is that the standoff is over. what we don't know is whether or not the suspect is in custody. the last we heard a few hours ago is that no officers had been hurt and the suspects and injuries were unknown at that time. what we do know is there's been gun fire exchanged the last six plus hours between that suspect in a rural field about 50 miles northeast of cincinnati with law enforcement there after he led them hahn a car chase for roughly an hour after this morning and shortly after 9:00 a.m. when there was some kind of an incident outside the fbi field office in cincinnati. agents there on the ground reportedly said there was some type of potential threat from this individual at the bureau's visiting screening center. the building that allows people to get access to the larger

building. reports suggest this individual may have filed a nail gun. when agents approached him, he showed them an assault-style rifle and took off in this car chase and went to this field. the standoff has ended. roads are being opened again. we're awaiting on the update of the suspect, if they took him in to custody or if his life was ended. charles? >> charles: the cincinnati field office itself, is everything okay? are they back to operating as normal? >> yeah, we're told it's safe and secure. a little damage. looked like they were placing boards up this afternoon. no current threats to the fbi field off. we are told that fbi field offices across the country are operating under a heightened posture this week after an increase in threats to both of the fbi and officials there following the raid at mar-a-largo earlier this week. >> charles: thanks, garrett. thanks at home for joining us.

"the five" will take it from here. you can cam me on fbn, "making money." this is a historic time for who we are as a nation, for your money and the stock market is a whirlwind. see you tomorrow. for now, here's "the five." ♪♪r now, here's "the five." >> hello everyone, i'm judge jeanine pirro along with harold ford jr., jesse watters, dana perino, and greg gutfeld. it's 5:00 in new york city, and this is the 5. ♪♪ after days of intense pressure, attorney general merrick garland finally speaking out on the fbi's unprecedented raid on former president donald trump's home. garland defending the justice department's actions but did not take any questions.