‘Special Report’ All-Star Panel on Trump’s request for special master

This is a rush transcript from “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” August 31, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. BENNIE THOMPSON, (D-MS) CHAIRMAN, JANUARY 6th SELECT COMMITTEE: For the president to somehow decide that he is going to take boxes and boxes of classified documents home with him is just note what the law requires.

I trust the FBI. They are just doing their job. It’s not a partisan effort.

REP. KEN BUCK, (R-CO) HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: The Department of Justice should have gone to court and used the lessons — least intrusive means possible to enforce whatever they were trying to do. The fact that he had documents in and of itself isn’t a concern. How he treated those documents and what negotiations occurred with the archivist, we just don’t know at this point.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN ROBERTS, GUEST HOST: The debate over the prudence of the federal raid at the president’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, back at the beginning of August continues to rage. So let’s keep it going.

Let’s bring in our panel, Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief of “The Federalist,” Ben Domenech, editor at large of “The Spectator” and host of “The Ben Domenech Podcast” on FOX News Radio, and Leslie Marshall, Democratic strategist.

So the Department of Justice in a late night filing made what it believes is a very strong case against the appointment of a special master which will be taken up in court in Florida tomorrow, saying, quote, “Appointment of a special master is unnecessary and would significantly harm important governmental interests, including national security interests.” Leslie, what about full transparency given the precedential nature of this raid?

LESLIE MARSHALL, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Well, full transparency when you have a special master obviously is going to occur. But if you have full transparency and you are involving witnesses and there could be witnesses that are not only tampered with but whose lives could be threatened or even harmed when you are talking about agents whose names could be revealed, especially if those agents are undercover, that certainly is problematic.

If we want to talk transparency, then let’s talk about a couple of things. In my opinion, a raid is what we did with Usama bin Laden. Not this. Secondly, when we talk about transparency, the National Archives asked forever these months ago. This wasn’t like, oh, we are not going to tell anybody. There was communication. There was a search warrant. This wasn’t done 3:00 in the morning where they were climbing over the former president’s bed to get things in the closet.

And these are documents, it’s not like they haven’t found anything. They have. And these are documents that should have not left the White House, and they are — they have top security clearance. Even FBI officials looking them over have to have been at the highest clearance that there is within our law enforcement agencies.

ROBERTS: You stole my next element. But Ben, if we are talking about just the appointment of special master here, we are not going to get into sources and methods and witnesses, et cetera.

BEN DOMENECH, FOX…