How Common Are Searches Like The One FBI Agents Conducted At John Bolton's Home?

On "Forbes Newsroom," criminal defense attorney Jo-Anna Nieves discussed the FBI raid on John Bolton's home.

Transcript

00:00So step one, investigate. Step two, bring it to a grand jury. Then you wait for the grand jury to

00:08make its decision. Is that kind of the order of operations here? Right. And then that would

00:13establish what charges, you know, is he actually going to be facing if any? And then we would know

00:20what's the exposure and all of those different charges combined. Then if he's actually convicted

00:25of the charges, we know their sentencing. And that sentencing is usually based on federal guidelines.

00:32Now, as we get into the motivations behind this FBI search, I want to ask a contextual question,

00:38Joanna, which is how common are searches like these? Are you able to give us some sense of

00:43history or context here?

00:45It search warrants in general are very common, very prevalent in probably every type of criminal

00:56investigation. What we're considering is search warrants for classified documents. You know,

01:04we don't hear it come up as much. And I think much of that has to do contextually with the fact that

01:08if we do discover classified information, then we were to actually bring this to a federal court for

01:17prosecution, we run the risk of national security classified information being put on display in

01:24public. And so the prosecution has to make the decision as to whether, you know, what's more

01:30valuable, the protection of national security secrets or prosecuting an individual.

01:35So that's a consideration yet to be made. Or did that already factor into the execution of this

01:43warrant? I think it's a consideration yet to be made because we don't know if anything exists that's

01:49worth prosecuting. And that rises to the level of investing resources, investing time and putting

01:55class potentially classified information on display. So right now, it's definitely in that

02:00investigatory phase. And we'll see if it leads to anything.