McCarthy:
All search warrants involve the possibility of forced entry. All of them involve police seizures of property, which can subject the personnel involved to legal risks as well as safety risks. The cops or federal agents usually do a good job of identifying themselves during the process of seeking or forcing entry; yet there are tragic instances in which people inside the premises mistakenly believe violent criminals, rather than cops, are trying to get in, resulting in physical confrontations including, sometimes, exchanges of gunfire.
As a result, and as a matter of common sense, the FBI always has an operational plan for carrying out a court-authorized search. That plan customarily involves reminding the search teams of the FBI’s use-of-force policies. Those policies, of course, include a refresher on the conditions under which lethal force may be used. This is to prepare law-enforcement officials for contingencies that are all too familiar, and to protect the agency and agents in the event of later legal claims.
If you don’t instantly grasp why police agencies would perform these prudential steps, you must have been living under a rock for the last decade or so, which has featured no shortage of instances in which allegations of excessive police force have been made (and a thankfully small percentage of instances when excessive force was actually used), with intense scrutiny and occasional rioting in the aftermath.
It would have been surprising if the Mar-a-Lago search hadn’t been conducted in accordance with an operational plan of which use-of-force policies were a component. It was important to do this search by the book — more on that momentarily. But there was never anticipation that force, much less lethal force, would be used, and there was never any threat to the former president. My understanding is that the FBI was reluctant to do the search — it was Justice Department officials who ran out of patience with Trump’s intransigence. The bureau intentionally carried out the search when it was known that Trump was not on the premises.
