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Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Rie Gaillan. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Garrett graph author, historian and founding director of the Aspen Institute's cyber initiatives.

He's also a contributor to wired and CNN has written for many publications, including Esquire, Rolling Stone and the New York Times and his edited Washingtonian magazine and Politico magazine.

As an author, he has a wide-ranging catalog of books, including his latest Watergate, a new history, which came out earlier this year and is available wherever fine books are sold.

Today, he's coming to us from Burlington, Vermont. Garrett, thanks for joining me.

It's my pleasure to chat a lot to cover this week. Well, my goodness is there ever. The reason why we asked you here today is because earlier this week is we're recording on Monday, the FBI conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago.

And this was part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including some that might have been classified.

News of the search started to come to light when Donald Trump himself, who was that Trump tower in New York at the time released a statement that said, quote,

these are dark times for our nation. As my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida is currently under siege, rated and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.

Nothing like this has ever happened to a president of the United States before. Later on in that same statement, Trump went on to say, quote, they even broke into my safe.

What is the difference between this and Watergate where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee here in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States. So Garrett, there's an enormous amount here.

So why don't we start with the beginning, which is why was the FBI there in the first place?

So Reed, I think it's worth backing up one step from what we know now to what our first thoughts were when the news of the search broke. It is worth remarking on as we consider what a weird moment we are in politically and historically that when word first came Monday night that the FBI was searching Mar-a-Lago, we didn't know why.

And that there were in fact literally a half dozen different criminal investigations or criminal conspiracies that are unfolding that we know that various investigative agencies and the federal government and the FBI are interested in that could have been the source of this search.

So sort of like a social club in the Bronx, who knows why they were there could have been anything. Exactly. You start with the challenge and the unprecedented nature of the FBI executing a lawfully authorized search warrant at the home of a former president.

I mean, that alone is bonkers and worthy of note. The second is that this is a former president whose apparent criminality is so broad and runs in so many different directions in our modern moment that there were a half dozen different cases that people were speculating about Monday night that this could be tied to.

I mean, the January 6th coup, the fake electors scheme, the effort to pressure Georgia election officials, financial improprieties or this controversy that has been running in the background all year over Trump's handling of classified materials as a former president.

And of course, as you well remember, my understanding from the 2016 campaign is that there is no more important issue in America today than the safe and secure handling of classified material.

So this is a ultimate irony that seven years later here we are and Donald Trump himself is the one facing questions about is classified material.

Right. And I mean, to your point, I think when the news started breaking, you started to see all of the Fox and all of these folks starting to say this is unprecedented Trump even said it.

This has never happened before, but I think the parallel to that is what you just described here, which is we've never had a president maybe since Nixon and not even Nixon who had so many unprecedented things either happened during his campaign during his presidency during the end of his presidency, which he did not obviously want to end.

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