Rick Scott doesn’t know why ‘authoritarian’ Mar-a-Lago raid happened

Rick Scott. Image via AP

The more time that has passed between the FBI search and seizure of classified materials from Donald Trump’s Florida residence, the less Rick Scott knows about it.

That’s the takeaway from comments he made Thursday morning in a national television interview, where the Florida Senator discussed the enforcement action at Mar-a-Lago in context of Hillary Clinton warning about “authoritarianism” in the Republican Party.

“Well, first off, if she wants to talk about authoritarianism, let’s talk about one, the Mar-a-Lago raid,” Scott said. “We don’t know why they did it.”

“We need information,” Scott said, framing the warranted search as “against a former President” and “potential political opponent” of President Joe Biden.

Scott then pivoted to “87,000 more IRS agents” as his second example of so-called authoritarianism.

In the weeks since federal agents searched the Trump compound and retrieved classified materials, Scott has issued a series of statements demanding to know more about why the “unprecedented action” happened. Scott and U.S. Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma formally demanded that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hold a hearing to parse what actually happened, thus far to no avail.

“Think about this: Where is Biden? Why wouldn’t he demand? He’s going to be a former President someday. Why wouldn’t he sit there and demand transparency,” Scott mused during a friendly interview on the Fox News Channel last month.

More information has emerged, of course, and the selective leaks portray the former President unsympathetically.

The latest reporting from the Washington Post offers more detail on the information secreted away by Trump, including classified documentation of a foreign power’s nuclear capabilities. Previous reporting revealed that Trump took a tranche of classified information with him as well.

Scott isn’t the only Florida Senator essentially crying “fake news” as bombshells fall in the wake of the FBI search. Marco Rubio is also “skeptical” about the information that has been coming out for weeks, saying it’s a way to “influence the narrative.”

“First of all, we really don’t know,” Rubio said. “Let’s go back and understand that all this information is coming from one side and one place. And that is ‘sources with knowledge of the investigation.’”

“Who are the sources with knowledge of the investigation? The FBI and the Justice Department. And they are leaking to the media. So, generally when there is an investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department, they’re not even acknowledging there is an investigation, much less leaking.”