Show Notes
Investigative reporter and On Background host Susan Crabtree overlapped with Savannah Guthrie during their time covering the White House and can “only imagine what personal hell she’s going through” after the kidnapping of her mother Nancy Guthrie from her Arizona home.
The investigation into the kidnapping of the television personality’s mother quickly became a federal matter, with the FBI coming in with its massive resources. For Crabtree, though, that raises questions.
“I think we’re getting to the stage where the FBI is bringing all of its resources to bear, and all of us, wonder, as average Americans, whether the same resources would be brought to bear for one of our loved ones. Certainly, it has national media attention,” she says.
Co-host Eric Eggers agrees. “There have been other people to go missing recently. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, Alaska, Arizona, Oregon have the highest rate of missing persons per 100,000 residents. And there are more 26,000 active cases of missing people in this country right now,” he says, referencing their website. “If you sort by the latest date of contact, Nancy Guthrie is not even on the first page anymore.”
The local side of the investigation, now on its 14th day, has come under criticism as well. Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos for taking time out to attend a college basketball game. “I think some of that type of criticism is warranted, and I always will stand up for the press and the ability to get the story out and provide some sunlight,” Crabtree says.
“We have to be asking questions, because it’s in the public interest to make sure these investigations are done in the most professional manner possible,” she added.
One aspect of search procedure that surprised many observers was in Google being able to assist with getting the video footage from the doorbell camera at Nancy Guthrie’s home. Crabtree notes that it was provided without a judicial warrant.
“We had that video footage that Google was able to provide, she says. “Did they [investigators] go through the court system or are they issuing administrative subpoenas? That’s what they’re known to try when these government entities like the FBI and the Secret Service don’t have to actually go through the courts. They can just issue these administrative subpoenas to private companies and telecom companies to for phone records if they feel like there is a threat involved.”
Nevertheless, she has misgivings. “I see both sides of that, because I understand from my sources that the Secret Service is using a lot of administrative subpoenas lately, much more than they did in the past. I would like to know exactly how they’re obtaining those. They’re requesting those through the telecom companies,” she says.
At the same time, she concedes this is now a national story, and Nancy Guthrie’s life is threatened without access to her medication, adding more pressure to the search.
Eggers notes that a similar type of warrantless search was used on members of Congress during the Jan. 6th investigation, as later auditing of that investigation has discovered. Several congressmen and senators had their phone records subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 investigation without their knowledge.
Crabtree’s law enforcement sources told her off the record they were thrilled when the FBI managed to get that video evidence from the Google Nest camera, she notes.
Crabtree also has some new detail on the continuing investigation into US Secret Service (USSS) failures during the Butler, Pennsylvania event where a sniper nearly killed then-candidate Trump. Current USSS director Sean Curran was head of the Butler detail at the time and handed off the development of the site security plan for the event to a young female agent named Myo Perez, who was known among her fellow agents to be a “partier.” Perez was suspended from field work and assigned to a desk job for her failures that day, although neither of her supervisors, who both signed off on her work, have suffered any disciplinary action.
Crabtree learned this week that Perez had been placed back in the field on the detail for former President George W. Bush. “People [at USSS] did not like that at all. It was a big no-no. And I heard that it went to the highest levels of the Department of Homeland Security. They made phone calls immediately to Sean Curran. And that’s never going to happen again,” Crabtree says.
