In my haste yesterday I failed to account for Twitter showing me timestamps of Tweets converted to my timezone rather than in the timezone of the Tweeter.
So, DOJ arrives at Mar-a-lago at 10 AM ET.
Trump releases his statement at pretty close to 6:55 PM ET, about 9 hours later.
Here’s a link to a transcript from Ari Melber’s show from August 8, 2022 which airs from 6 - 7 PM ET.
Scroll way to the bottom to see, after the 6:55 PM ET timestamp, Ari say this among the last sentences he says on his show that day.
We have breaking news courtesy of a brand new statement that just crossed from Donald Trump. He asserts in this statement that his home in Mar-a-Lago is “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.” This new statement from Donald Trump seems to assert that there is an FBI raid recent or ongoing.
…
But a big headline here. NBC News and MSNBC has not yet confirmed, but the former president saying there is a raid at Mar-a-lago.
So Trump sat on saying something publicly about the DOJ visit for at least nine hours.
Why did he choose to say something at that time? Not because he just learned about it, but because the story had broken at 6:36 PM ET.
Here’s Peter Schorsch’s Tweet from 6:36 PM ET.
Schorsch never gets credit for breaking the story, but within minutes that Tweet was being heavily circulated among political reporters big and small, those people were reaching out to everyone in their contact lists who might be able to confirm one of the biggest stories of the year, and plenty of those contacts were people who had a direct line to Trump if not Trumps himself. Someone was going to confirm something, and do so soon, because the number of people hearing about it was increasing exponentially, and someone feeling chatty was going to spill the beans.
So Trump was happy to refrain from saying anything publicly about the search for almost nine hours as long as there was a chance that this story wasn’t going to break. It’s only after it became apparent that this was going public that Trump released his statement. He was trying to get in front of the story with that statement.
It’s quite clear Trump was more than capable about keeping it to himself as long as the story wasn’t out there. We know this because that’s what happened.