A veteran former police officer and former 2022 Republican candidate for Oklahoma governor said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the federal Department of Justice brought charges against Donald Trump following an “unprecedented” raid of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida by the FBI.
“You don’t go to this level with a person of this level if you don’t or are not thinking about filing charges. You don’t do it,” said Dr. Mark Sherwood, a retired 24-year veteran of the Tulsa Police Department and 10-year member of the department’s SWAT Team.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if some charges are filed—even if the evidence is not thoroughly vetted,” Sherwood said.
“The timing of it is curious, to say the least. You’re coming into the tail end of the mid-term primaries,” with Republicans poised to reclaim both chambers of Congress, he said.
As a former law enforcement officer, Sherwood served many search warrants and knew the legal process for obtaining them.
What he finds “highly unusual” was the FBI’s decision to search the home of a former sitting president against all historical precedent.
Sherwood told The Epoch Times that not even the Watergate scandal that surrounded former president Richard Nixon or the impeachment of former president Bill Clinton prompted such unprecedented action.
“I don’t know of anything else in history” that reaches the same level, he said.
“What we don’t know is the total contents of the affidavit” used to obtain the search warrant, Sherwood said.
“I know there’s a lot of discussion on what parts of the affidavit to release. We don’t know what precipitated this acceleration” leading up to the Aug. 8 raid.
‘Extremely Broad’ Scope of Search Warrant
Sherwood said that search warrants are specific and limited in their scope as a rule. “It has to be so specific that there can be no other residence like [Trump’s] in the world. It also has to be very specific about what you are looking for and where it is [located].”
By Allan Stein