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Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Sunday told his fellow Republicans to stop casting judgment on the FBI after agents seized classified documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last week.
Hutchinson, a Republican, appeared on CNN “State of the Union” and said that if the GOP is going to be the party that stands by law enforcement, they must also support the FBI.
“The FBI is part of that,” the governor said. “And so, yes, we need to pull back on casting judgment on them. No doubt that they have higher-ups in the FBI has made mistakes. They do it. I have defended cases as well. And I have seen wrong actions.”
Hutchinson’s comments come after Trump lashed out at the FBI on social media Saturday night, calling their integrity into question.
TRUMP LASHES OUT AT FBI AMID FALLOUT FROM MAR-A-LAGO RAID: ‘SEE WHAT THEY WERE WILLING TO DO’
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson asked GOP members to stand by law enforcement and “pull back” on judgments cast on the FBI following the unprecedented raid last week on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
(Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images, File)
“The FBI has a long and unrelenting history of being corrupt. Just look back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover,” the former president wrote on TRUTH Social, referencing the first director of the federal bureau.
Hutchinson said the agents on the ground, whom he praised as heroic, were not to blame and said that it’s the leaders at the Department of Justice who should be held accountable.
“We cannot say that, whenever they went in and did that search, that they were not doing their job as law enforcement officers,” Hutchinson said of the agents. “If you want to hold people accountable, it is the Department of Justice. It is the attorney general who said he supervised that.
“The FBI is simply carrying out their responsibilities under the law, a lawful search warrant that a magistrate to signed off on,” he added.
The FBI spent several hours executing a search warrant on the former president’s estate, where they found boxes that contained varying degrees of classification, including top secret and confidential information.
The search warrant, unsealed by a judge days later, showed the FBI search was connected to a possible violation of the Espionage Act.
An aerial view of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is seen on Aug. 10, 2022, in Palm Beach, Florida.
(AP Photo/Steve Helber)
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Hutchinson said that Americans should back all law enforcement.
“Let’s support law enforcement. Let’s stand with them,” he said. “Whether it’s the DEA, the FBI or your local law enforcement. That’s critically important that we do that because they’re simply trying to do their job and to keep anarchy away from our country.”
