President Joe Biden "had to know" that the FBI was going to former President Donald Trump's Florida estate to search for presidential records and seize them, because the Department of Justice would not have acted in such a manner without direction from Attorney General Merrick Garland, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik said on Newsmax on Tuesday.
"They took the move because somebody at DOJ, and it could only be the attorney general, directed them to," Kerik told Newsmax's "John Bachman Now." "The president had to know about it. President Biden had to know what they were doing and had to sign off on the move. The DOJ is run by the attorney general. No FBI agent was going to Mar-a-Lago without the attorney general's approval."
Several reports Tuesday, including from NPR, said that the White House did not have prior knowledge of the raid, but Kerik disagreed.
The FBI's action, Kerik said, "came right from the White House. What we saw was their third-world country tactics. This stuff happens in Venezuela. It happens in Cuba, and Colombia, and it happens in dictatorships like Russia and China. It never has happened here."
Kerik added that that "frightens me."
"What scares me is that in those countries that I just mentioned, what do they do?" he said. "Their intent behind things like this is to annihilate their opposition. In those countries, they imprison them or they kill them. We're in a position right now where Donald Trump has been impeached twice. He's being investigated in Washington, in Georgia, New York, and other states … it's political persecution."
When you add in the Jan. 6 committee proceedings, that means "there's one intent" with all the investigations, said Kerik, and that is to keep Trump from running for president in 2024.
Meanwhile, there is no presumption of innocence when it comes to Trump, said Kerik.
"I've been one that's been targeted by this government and I can tell you, I have been doing this 35 years [and] I would have never, ever assumed that the Justice Department would have done what they did yesterday," he said.
Meanwhile, Trump has produced other requested documents without issue, but Kerik said that this time, there was a raid that was "all about theater."
"This is just like the Jan. 6 committee, just like this artificial investigation that they're doing," he said. "That's what happened yesterday. This was all about theater."
Biden, Kerik said, "authorized it for political reasons. They're trying to stop Donald Trump from being elected in 2024."
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