CNN’s Dana Bash grilled GOP Gov. Chris Sununu on his request for “unprecedented transparency” in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, asking him Sunday if he was at all worried about releasing more information in the affadavit, considering it was confidential and, in many cases, top secret.
“Aren’t you concerned that revealing that will defeat the purpose of the investigation, which is to try to keep information that is supposed to be secret just that for national security reasons?” Bash asked Sununu.
Bash’s probe followed the New Hampshire governor’s criticism of the lack of transparency regarding the subject matter involved in the heavily redacted affidavit released by the Justice Department last week.
“My biggest criticism — and I think the concern of most of the country — is ‘where is the transparency?’” Sununu told Bash. “We want to see it … If you’re gonna take unprecedented action and raid a former president’s house, well, you better have a strategy for unprecedented transparency.”
He went on to say that while many are “concerned” about the contents of the documents seized during the raid, he insisted that “you gotta be able to show your cards when you’re taking actions like this.”
Bash tried again to answer her question: “But you know that you can’t show all your cards when you’re talking about top-secret information. The whole point of the investigation, we now know, was that there’s very important, classified information, including human clandestine sources at risk here, so they can’t reveal everything.”
The CNN host yet again asked Sununu if he was concerned about the potential risk to American intelligence and national security, to which he dodged by saying, “we should absolutely be concerned … but I don’t know what to be concerned about!”
Bash clapped back and noted that revealing the redacted information might “defeat the purpose of the investigation.”
“I’m not saying put all the documents on the Internet, but I’m saying, ‘give us some sense of the subject matter,’” he said, noting his “disappointment” to see that the affidavit was “almost all redacted,” before implying a connection between the raid and upcoming midterm elections.
“Former President Trump has been out of office for going on two years now,” Sununu said. “Think this is just a coincidence happening just a few months before the midterm elections and all that sort of thing?”
Before moving on, Bash recalled the timeline of the investigation, which began in May 2021 and ended with the search after an “exhaustive attempt to get this information.”
