- A GOP congressman called for the release of the FBI affidavit underpinning the Mar-a-Lago raid.
- Rep. Mike Turner told CBS News on Sunday that Trump may have kept classified documents to write a memoir.
A GOP lawmaker said Sunday that former President Donald Trump may have kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence in order to write a memoir.
In an interview with CBS News' "Face the Nation," Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio called for the release of the affidavit supporting the FBI's search warrant for Trump's Florida estate earlier this month. FBI agents seized about 20 boxes, including 11 sets marked as top secret or sensitive, in their raid on August 8.
Turner, who is the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the affidavit "will give us the information to understand how did the FBI justify raiding Mar-a-Lago and spending nine hours in the president's house."
When asked why Trump would take classified documents home in the first place, Turner said: "Well, I don't know. I mean, you have to ask him. But certainly, we all know that every former president has access to their documents. It's how they write their memoirs."
"They don't have, you know, great recall of everything that's occurred in their administration," he said.
It's not clear if Turner is saying that former presidents took classified documents with them after their administrations ended.
Trump has defended having the documents at Mar-a-Lago and said that they were already declassified. He also falsely equated his situation to former President Barack Obama, whom Trump claimed moved "30 million pages of documents taken from the White House to Chicago." In reality, Obama had moved some of his presidential records to a federal government facility in Chicago after his time in office.
Presidential records must be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration after an administration ends as they belong to the American people.
Trump has also called for the affidavit underpinning the raid to be released without any redactions, dismissing the Department of Justice's argument that doing so could impede its ongoing investigation and jeopardize witnesses. It's not clear if Turner was calling for an unredacted or redacted version of the affidavit.
The Florida judge who approved the FBI search warrant said he was inclined to unseal parts of the affidavit, and asked the DOJ to submit its proposed redactions by this Thursday, after which he will make a decision whether or not to release it.
Turner, who is a Trump supporter, told CNN's "Face the Nation" last week that he would be surprised if the former president had been in possession of documents that "rise to the level of immediate national security threat."
It's also not clear if Trump has plans to write a memoir.
So far, the former president released a photo book of his time in the White House, for which he contributed the captions.
He said last year that he was writing "the book of all books" about his term as president, but has yet to sign a publishing deal.
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.