“THE ONGOING VENDETTA OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AGAINST DONALD TRUMP”
Last night I was on the Bolt Report with host Andrew Bolt, on Australia’s Sky News. We talked about the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s house, the insane responses thereto by people like Michael Hayden, and related matters. I think it is fair to say that the conversation was hard-hitting, but entertaining. This is the segment. It is around 7 1/2 minutes long:
Records Suggest A Backbench Bureaucrat’s Partisan Grievance Spurred The FBI’s Nakedly Political Raid On Trump
AUGUST 15, 2022
The purpose of the grand jury investigation and raid on Mar-a-Lago was to get Donald Trump, not documents.
by MARGOT CLEVELAND at the Federalist:
Last week’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home represented the culmination of a criminal investigation pushed by a partisan bureaucrat who called January 6, 2021, the “absolute worst” day of his life. And while since last Monday, the country has focused on the FBI’s raid of Trump’s personal residence, seeing that as the crossing of the Rubicon, the die was cast this spring when the DOJ went to the grand jury about Trump’s presidential records.
Reporting by the New York Times and Washington Post — some from months ago — when pieced together and considered in tandem with past practices related to presidential and other governmental records, reveals this reality. The relevant reporting started no later than February of this year, when the Washington Post broke the news that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) confirmed in a statement, issued by the then-archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero, that in January of 2022 NARA had retrieved from Mar-a-Lago 15 boxes of presidential records, which according to sources included items such as mementos, gifts, and letters. NARA added that Trump representatives were “continuing to search” for additional records.
Months later, in interviewing the then-recently retired Ferriero, the Washington Post detailed the origins of the retrieval of the 15 boxes. At the conclusion of Trump’s presidency, the Post reported, Ferriero “was told by the White House Office of Records Management about a group of boxes in the White House residence that should go to the Archives.”
“As we were moving materials from the White House just before the inauguration, those boxes hadn’t shown up yet,” Ferriero said. The retired archivist then explained how he remembered “watching the Trumps leave the White House and getting off in the helicopter that day, and someone carrying a white banker box, and saying to myself, ‘What the hell’s in that box?’” According to Ferriero, “that began a whole process of trying to determine whether any records had not been turned over to the Archives.”
During the spring of 2021, NARA reportedly “discovered some high-profile documents missing, such as correspondence with North Korean’s leader Kim Jong Un, that Trump once described as ‘love letters,’” the letter President Barack Obama had left for Trump, and a map of Hurricane Dorian that had been altered with a black marker by Trump. And according to Ferriero’s congressional testimony, NARA “began talking with Trump’s people right after they left office” about “presidential records.”
Here, an aside is necessary to understand the concept of “presidential records” and NARA’s involvement.
The Presidential Records Act Provides the Backstory
The Presidential Records Act provides that documents created or received by the president or his immediate staff, such as memos, letters, notes, emails, and other written communications, related to a president’s official duties, constitute “presidential records” and must be preserved. The act further declares that the United States shall “retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records.” And at the conclusion of a president’s term in office, the “Archivist of the United States” “assumes responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records.”
In contrast, “personal records” remain the property of the outgoing president and include diaries, journals, or personal notes “not prepared or utilized for, or circulated or communicated in the course of, transacting Government business.” Likewise, “materials relating to private political associations” or “relating exclusively to the President’s own election to the office of the Presidency” and not related to the duties of the president, qualify as personal records and not “Presidential Records.”
NARA maintained that letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and other documents qualified as “presidential records” that the United States owned. And by working with Trump representatives, NARA arranged to retrieve from Mar-a-Lago 15 boxes of presidential papers in January of 2022.
The Leaks Begin — And So Does the Witch Hunt
As noted above, Ferriero confirmed for the press in February 2022 that the 15 boxes of material had been retrieved by the NARA. Then in a February 10, 2022, article, the Post reported two significant leaks: first, that within the material returned to NARA were documents marked as classified, and second, that “archives officials asked the Justice Department to look into the matter…”
By March 2022, NARA was reportedly in “‘consultation’ with the Justice Department,” and by April 7, 2022, according to leaks to the Post, the DOJ had launched an investigation into Trump related to the 15 boxes of material retrieved by NARA. Another DOJ leaker reportedly told Newsweek that in late April 2022, “a federal grand jury began deliberating whether there was a violation of the Presidential Records Act or whether President Trump unlawfully possessed national security information,” and that “the grand jury concluded that there had been a violation of the law.”
Further leaks revealed that the DOJ by springtime had issued a subpoena to Trump purporting to seek “additional documents that it believed may have been in his possession.” The grand jury reportedly also issued subpoenas to obtain “surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago, including views from outside the storage room” where Trump has stored documents from his presidency.
According to the New York Times, in response to the grand jury subpoena, a top counterintelligence official for the Justice Department met with Trump’s lawyers on June 3 at Mar-a-Largo and reportedly “left with additional material marked classified.” Leakers also claimed, in the latest of the ever-changing justifications for the raid, that around the same time as the visit to Trump’s Florida home, one of his lawyers provided a declaration “attesting that all the material marked classified in the boxes had been turned over.” Then, after a “confidential human source” reportedly told the FBI that Trump continued to hide classified documents, even providing “the location of those documents,” according to “two senior government officials,” the DOJ moved to obtain the search warrant.
‘Classified’ Is a Red Herring
Shortly after news broke of the raid, and as the public backlash to the apparent political targeting of a former president of the United States began to swell, DOJ leakers took to their PR teams at the New York Times and Washington Post to spin the search as a drastic response to a dire problem: Trump’s supposed possession of documents about nuclear secrets.
“Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation,” ran the Washington Post’s lead in its coverage of the developing story. The New York Times repeated the storyline, claiming Trump was seeking to “deflect attention from reports that the classified documents he had kept in his Florida home might have contained materials related to nuclear weapons…”
Rather than prompt the public’s concern, however, the country, whose memory of the Times and Post’s peddling of the Russia-collusion hoax remained fresh, ridiculed the posited justification — that Trump had stolen nuclear secrets — for the raid. The focus of coverage, nonetheless, remained on the supposed “classified” nature of the materials stored at Mar-a-Lago, especially after the release of the inventory list that documented the seizing of classified documents.
Trump and his defenders countered these claims by stressing that as president, he had declassified all of the documents he had removed from the White House — something within his constitutional authority as the commander-in-chief. However, a close look at the search warrant reveals the “classification” question is a red herring: None of the three criminal statutes relied upon by the DOJ to justify the search required the material sought to be classified.
The Criminal Codes in the Search Warrant Don’t Care About Classification Status
Specifically, the search warrant specified that the “property to be seized” included “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, 2017, or 1591.” Material need not be classified to fall within any of those criminal code provisions.
Rather, for instance, under Section 793, also called the Espionage Act, it is a crime for a person with “unauthorized possession of” documents or information “relating to the national defense,” that the possessor “has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation,” to “willfully retain[] the same and fail[] to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.” Documents and information could be “related to the national defense” without being “classified,” and an intelligence community desperate to convict Trump of something could easily frame the material as providing an “advantage” to a foreign nation. Further, given the Presidential Records Act, Trump arguably has “unauthorized possession” of the material, although if it is a copy the issue is dicier.
The second statute cited, Section 2017, criminalizes the removal, destruction, or concealing of government records, which would include presidential papers, and again that provision of the criminal code does not require the documents to be classified. And the third statute, Section 1591, addresses “Obstruction of Justice,” but before moving there, the warrant’s reference to Section 2017, read in light of the leakers’ comments, proves informative to understand the latest targeting of Trump.
Newsweek’s “exclusive” report on the supposed confidential human source that prompted the search of Mar-a-Lago claimed that “the road to the raid began a year-and-a-half ago, when in the transition from the Trump administration to that of President Joe Biden, there were immediate questions raised by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as to whether the presidential records turned over to the federal agency for historical preservation were complete or not.”
Leakers Gave Away the Game
The DOJ leaker reportedly told Newsweek that NARA “believe[ed] that the former White House was stonewalling and continued to possess unauthorized material” and that the National Archive then, earlier this year, “asked the Justice Department to investigate.” The same leaker claimed a grand jury had “concluded that there had been a violation of the law.” Further, according to Newsweek and its “intelligence source,” “the affidavit to obtain the search warrant” “contained abundant and persuasive detail that Trump continued to possess the relevant records in violation of federal law, and that investigators had sufficient information to prove that those records were located at Mar-a-Lago — including the detail that they were contained in a specific safe in a specific room.”
Putting aside for a moment the DOJ’s reliance on “Obstruction of Justice,” this leak reveals the raid of Mar-a-Lago resulted from the criminal investigation into Trump’s compliance with the Presidential Records Act, prompted by NARA under the leadership of then-Archivist Ferriero. And for three reasons, Americans can safely conclude the DOJ’s launching of a criminal investigation — and its use of a grand jury — to target former president Trump was a political witch hunt.
First, NARA handled its discovery of Hillary Clinton’s violation of the equivalent “Federal Records Act” vastly differently. In September of 2015, in response to questions from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, about the former secretary of state’s use of a non-governmental email account, Ferriero informed Grassley of NARA’s normal response to allegations of “unauthorized destruction or removal of federal records.” “NARA will write a letter to the agency asking it to report back to NARA within 30 days and open a case file on the matter.” At that point, NARA and the agency would work together to recover any missing documents or to reconstruct them if needed.
NARA then explained that upon learning of Clinton’s use of a non-governmental email account in March 2015, it “immediately acted In accordance with our regulations by sending a letter to the State Department, setting off the process described above.” Significantly, while noting that the use of the non-government email may result in a separate DOJ investigation, in the case of Clinton, “NARA has not Initiated an ‘Investigation’ of Secretary Clinton’s email practices; rather, as noted above, we have been communicating with the State Department on this matter, and are deferring to the State Department’s review (and any other agencies conducting Investigations).”
In contrast, in the case of Trump, NARA referred the matter of documents stamped “classified” to the DOJ, which promptly opened an investigation into Trump and used a grand jury to subpoena Trump and others.
Numerous public statements by Ferriero, who at the time of the referral to the DOJ served as the country’s archivist, suggest a partisan goal underlying the referral. First was Ferriero’s bizarre overreaction to “watching the Trumps leaving the White House and getting off in the helicopter” while someone was “carrying a white banker box.” “What the hell’s in that box?,” Ferriero claimed he asked himself.
Then there was Ferriero’s admission that he decided to retire at the end of April 2022 “because he is worried about the political future.” “It’s important to me, that this administration replace me,” Ferriero said, adding, “I’m concerned about what’s going to happen in 2024. I don’t want it left to … the unknowns of the presidential election.”
That’s quite a strange statement for an archivist to make, suggesting as it does that politics matter in the performance of his role.
Third, Ferriero’s comments during a post-retirement interview discussing Jan. 6, suggest he holds an anti-Trump bias. “On his office television, David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, had watched outgoing President Donald Trump whip up the right-wing crowd near the White House,” the Post reported. Ferriero said he recalled watching “this angry mob … really angry, angry people” and thinking to himself, “if these people realize what’s in this building they’re passing, we’re at risk here.” The former archivist called January 6, 2021, “the worst day of his tenure as the keeper of the nation’s collective memory,” and “the worst day of my life” — “the absolute worst.”
It is not merely NARA’s referral to the DOJ and Ferriero’s apparent bias that suggests a political motive, however: It is the reality that even if the documents were classified, Trump has the right to access them and NARA could have worked with the former president to set up a secure location for his presidential papers, which is precisely what Ferriero and the NARA did with Barack Obama.
In 2016, before President Obama left office, he rented a private facility in Hoffman Estates to serve as a storage place for his presidential papers, and by October of 2016, while he was still in office, shipments of artifacts from his presidency began arriving at the suburban Chicago storage facility. A year later, the Chicago Tribune reported that after the National Archives and Records Administration had worked with the former Democrat president to ship his documents to the Chicago suburb, where they were stored and kept secured, Obama decided not to retain a paper archive at his presidential museum, “meaning they would be shipped back to Washington once a decision [was] made on where to keep them permanently.”
The Obama documents — both classified and unclassified — remained in Hoffman Estates well into 2018, as evidenced by a letter of intent executed between Ferriero on behalf of the National Archives Trust Fund and the Obama Foundation. Among other things, the letter of intent memorialized the Obama Foundation’s agreement to “transfer up to three million three hundred thousand dollars ($3,300,000) to the National Archives Trust Fund (NATF) to support the move of classified and unclassified Obama Presidential records and artifacts from Hoffman Estates to NARA-controlled facilities that conform to the agency’s archival storage standards for such records and artifacts.”
The only difference between the Hoffman Estates’ storage of the Obama presidential records that began in 2016 and the Mar-a-Lago storage of Trump’s presidential records was that the documents were technically within the possession of NARA. But even though the documents were legally the property of NARA, Obama still had the right to access the records, including the classified documents.
So if upon receiving the 15 boxes of documents back from Trump, NARA had legitimate concerns about the security of Mar-a-Lago — a strange worry to hold given that the Secret Service must safeguard the location to protect Trump and his family — a bureaucracy committed to the country and safeguarding her artifacts would have worked to arrange for the documents to be preserved under the auspices of NARA control in a location chosen by Trump, as it had done with Obama.
It’s the Grand Jury, Stupid
But the presidential records were never the concern; nor were the documents with classified markings, which remained secured along with the Trump family. The goal was always to get Trump, which is why NARA referred the matter to the DOJ, which then used a grand jury to investigate the former president of the United States. And once the grand jury began the case, under the apparent auspices of a violation of the Presidential Records Act — if the sources are believed — the DOJ teed up the possibility of an “Obstruction of Justice” charge for anything less than full cooperation in the mind of the FBI.
Whether Trump’s lawyer signed a declaration that inaccurately claimed Trump had no documents marked as classified is unknown. If so, it would appear an obstruction charge will be forthcoming, but then so will a fight over whether Trump’s lawyer meant Trump had not retained any “classified” documents since they had all been declassified and the marking just not fixed. Or maybe that’s all the declaration stated — that Trump did not possess any classified documents.
An Espionage Act charge would likewise face a high hurdle given the DOJ would need to establish that Trump had “reason to believe” the national defense information “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Further, to the extent the Biden administration would seek to charge Trump with mishandling classified material, that theory would fail given Trump’s absolute declassification authority.
That leaves (at least at this point — the creativity of the deep state remains untapped) Section 2017, which criminalizes the removal, destruction, or concealing of government records. But Trump did not remove the records and likely did not designate the records for shipment by GSA. And even if he did, Section 2017 seeks to protect government property, and if what Trump possessed consisted of mere copies of government records, there should be no violation of this criminal provision.
Given these problems with the underlying legal theories, targeting a political enemy and former president of the United States with a search warrant represents an unforgivable lapse in judgment. And as for the claim that the DOJ needed to recover these vital national security documents, the shifting stories spread by leakers suggest this rationale is simply a pretext.
After all, within the course of one week, the justification for the search went from “nuclear secrets” to classified documents, to videos suggesting the documents were not secure, to videos suggesting the Trump team was serendipitously moving the documents, to a confidential human source claiming Trump continued to possess presidential records, to a supposed lie by Trump’s attorney that there were no documents present at Mar-a-Lago marked classified.
No matter the excuse provided for the raid, however, the reality remains that the Biden administration launched an unnecessary grand jury criminal investigation into Trump based on a referral from a partisan archivist. And all Americans of goodwill see the obvious difference in the government’s treatment of Clinton, Obama, and Trump, proving the purpose of the investigation was “to get” Trump and not the documents.
Former Minnesota Senator Al Franken waited until the last minute to bestow his coveted endorsement on Rep. Liz Cheney via Twitter (below). Cheney is of course contending for the Republican nomination to stand for reelection to Wyoming’s single seat in the House. I’m sure Rep. Cheney appreciates Franken’s confidence as she seeks to persuade Wyoming conservatives that she is deserving of their continued support to represent them in Congress. It’s just what she needed. I hope the word gets out among all Wyoming Republicans voting tomorrow.
I was a fan of Franken and Davis back in the ’70’s. I thought they were funny, but I don’t think Franken has been funny in a long time.
Since Chuck Schumer forced Franken out of the Senate in disgrace he has resumed his career in show business. I have to admit that his endorsement of Cheney is funny in a way. However, the guy is a political obsessive. You can be sure that he is up to speed on Cheney’s invitation to Democrats to vote for her in the Republican primary tomorrow.
I’ve decided to endorse @RepLizCheney for the Republican nomination for the House seat In Wyoming it’s my first time endorsing in a GOP primary. But I think Al Franken’s support will carry a lot of weight with WY Republicans.
In a 1945 summary, a U.S. Army Air Forces unit on Okinawa described August as “an eventful month in world history.” That understatement holds up 77 years later.
Events had accelerated in the spring and summer of 1945. Germany surrendered on May 8 but Russia already was shipping massive amounts of men and materiel eastward. Moscow and Tokyo had a non-aggression treaty that Soviet premier Joseph Stalin cancelled on August 9. That night a massive Russian assault into Japanese-held Manchuria opened the Far East end game, briefly overlapping impending Japan’s surrender to the Allies.
American forces began deploying from Europe and the continental United States, anticipating the two-phase Operation Downfall invasion of Japan’s home islands. The first assault, on the southern island of Kyushu, was slated for November. The second, on the main island of Honshu, was due in March 1946.
Meanwhile, the atomic age had dawned with a 20-kiloton flash in the New Mexico desert on July 16. The three-year Manhattan Project yielded awe-inspiring results, and Tokyo’s refusal of the Allies’ Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender ensured that the atoms would be loosed. B-29 Superfortresses from the Mariana Islands 1,500 miles southeast of Japan were prepared to conduct “special missions” beyond conventional methods. An A-bomb destroyed Hiroshima on August 6 and, lacking any reply from Tokyo, a second weapon leveled Nagasaki three days later.
Even then, Japan’s war cabinet remained evenly divided between surrender and continued war. Finally, on August 15, Emperor Hirohito exerted unprecedented personal involvement in government affairs. His decision “to bear the unbearable” was met with fierce resistance in the palace guard but the plotters were quickly overcome. In his announcement Hirohito credited the A-bombs with his decision, citing “a most cruel new weapon.”
(I, GHR, REMEMBER THE DAY OF THE END OF THE WAR WELL. I CAN STILL HEAR THE SHOUT FROM A MOTHER AT HER FRONT DOOR A FEW HOUSES DOWN OUR BLOCK…”IT’S OVER!!!”)
Mothers Mothered then…..and as I recall, THEY WERE WONDERFUL AS MOTHERS….THEY WERE ALL NEIGHBORS ONE TO THE OTHER and often shared motherhood in groups!
I HAD BEEN IN CHARGE OF OUR NEIGHBORHOOD VICTORY GARDEN IN THE TWO EMPTY LOTS ACROSS THE BACK ALLEY. ( I STILL LABOR MY GARDEN, NEARLY AN ACRE IN SIZE THESE DAYS AND BEAUTIFUL to look at rather that be fed and feed neighbors because of a World War.)
Fathers over age 40 worked six days a week. Sunday was for Church, family, and vegetable gardened grounds, food to share with families whose fathers were over seas….(A neighborhood son was killed on the European front. I can’t remember his name anymore….but it was a German one!) Glenn H. Ray.
As always, it depends on how one defines “American.” The State Department and White House continue to define it as “citizens,” even though legal permanent residents qualify for American passports. Even by their measure, Joe Biden’s retreat under fire from Afghanistan left behind hundreds if not thousands of American citizens, even though Biden had pledged a year ago almost to the day that the US wouldn’t leave one behind.
The U.S. government has evacuated more than 800 American citizens from Afghanistan since the Taliban swept to power and U.S. troops officially left the country last August, according to data provided by House GOP investigators and the State Department.
The figure, which hasn’t been previously reported, highlights the ongoing nature of the efforts to make contact with and ultimately evacuate hundreds of Americans who were unable to leave Afghanistan as the U.S. military rapidly withdrew from the country last summer.
The data also underscores that hundreds more Americans were left behind in Afghanistan than was previously known.
That’s not entirely true. It’s more like thousands more Americans were left behind than the media liked to discuss, but the figures have been generally known for nearly a year. A State Department report to Congress in November put the figure at 14,000 Americans abandoned when including legal permanent residents (LPRs), commonly known as green-card holders. LPRs can carry American passports and are considered Americans in the diplomatic sense, and yet the State Department and Biden administration would only discuss US citizens in their counts — whenever anyone could pin them down at all on the issue of the Americans that Biden abandoned in his rush to retreat.
Even the 800 citizens apparently contradicts what the Biden administration told Congress last year:
Now, an investigation by the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Republican staff has found that 800 Americans were helped out of Afghanistan, indicating that the Biden administration either undercounted the number of Americans who wanted to depart the country or saw an uptick in the number of citizens willing to leave.
The same report also counts the number of evacuated LPRs at 600. Combined, that would make 1,400 exfils since the Biden collapse in Kabul. Compared to the State Department’s report to Congress in November, we’ve only confirmed the exit of one tenth of the abandoned Americans identified by the State Department in the year since Biden’s retreat.
Not only is that disgraceful, it’s also evidence of slowing efforts. The State Department claimed in December 2021 that 900 Americans (combined) had been exfiltrated at that point, four months after the rout in Kabul. If the new State figures are accurate, then we’ve only exfiltrated 700 more in eight months, less than half the rate after Biden’s bug-out.
And most of those exfils likely should get credited to private efforts. The State Department got in the way more than it helped in the first few months as private groups banded together to find exfil routes for abandoned Americans and our allies. My friend John Ondrasikled the efforts to raise resources for those groups and still focuses on those efforts at What Kind of World Do You Want, his non-profit group. It appears that the State Department hasn’t kept its focus, even to the extent it focused at all, on the evidence of Biden’s craven betrayal of Americans he left behind Taliban lines.
Girls are barred from secondary schools and women from traveling any significant distance without a male relative. Men in government offices are told to grow beards, wear traditional Afghan clothes and prayer caps, and stop work for prayers.
Music is officially banned, and foreign news broadcasts, TV shows and movies have been removed from public airwaves. At checkpoints along the streets, morality police chastise women who are not covered from head to toe in all-concealing burqas and headpieces in public.
A year into Taliban rule, Afghanistan has seemed to hurtle backward in time. The country’s new rulers, triumphant after two decades of insurgency, have reinstituted an emirate governed by a strict interpretation of Islamic law and issued a flood of edicts curtailing women’s rights, institutionalizing patriarchal customs, restricting journalists and effectively erasing many vestiges of an American-led occupation and nation-building effort. …
To enforce their decrees and stamp out dissent, the new Taliban government has employed police state tactics like door-to-door searches and arbitrary arrests — drawing widespread condemnation from international human rights monitors. Those tactics have instilled an undercurrent of fear in the lives of those who oppose their rule, and have cut off the country from millions in development aid and foreign assistance as it slips again into pariah state status.
Golly, who could have predicted that? Pretty much everyone, and even Biden himself made it clear over many years that he didn’t care about women’s rights in Afghanistan. He got exactly what he wanted out of the retreat … and so did the Taliban.
You can’t help but notice that the absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act has been reborn in the press as a health care and climate bill. Performing its usual public relations work for Minnesota’s DFL, the Star Tribune celebrates the faceless Senator Tina Smith. Washington correspondent Hunter Woodall leads his story on the bill this way:
After a series of setbacks over the last year, U.S. Sen. Tina Smith’s work on passing major climate legislation is culminating with an estimated $740 billion package that also focuses on health care and taxes.
Smith said in an interview that she has no doubt when she looks back on her time in Washington that she’ll see the legislation as “one of the most important things that I had a chance to work on.”
The bill is a far cry from the roughly $3.5 trillion piece of legislation pitched last year. The Senate Democrats’ deciding swing vote dismissed that package, even as its price tag was cut, leaving the party to scramble for a compromise.
It was good of Woodall to mention the word “taxes” (without more). However, students of ancient history may wonder whatever happened to “inflation reduction.” The word “inflation” appears only in a quote from a statement by GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It’s almost funny.
In episode seven of season three of “The Sopranos,” Paulie Walnuts knocks on fellow mobster Chistopher’s door demanding entry so he can, “take a look around.” Paulie first jokingly identified himself as “FBI” before conducting a search that included girlfriend Adriana’s underwear drawer at which point . . . well see it for yourself.
Not surprisingly, the invasion of Adriana’s privacy outraged Christopher as it would any man forced to endure an adversary pawing through the clothes of the woman he’s supposed to protect. The scene came to mind as we learned that the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago featured an intrusion into Melania Trump’s private wardrobe. This is the inner sanctum of privacy in a marital home. A bedroom wardrobe is the kind of place people keep lingerie and other items not meant for the eyes of anyone but a spouse. Whether the Trumps might have kept such things in their bedroom wardrobe is beside the point. It’s a private area that the government shouldn’t be searching without proper justification.
According to the New York Post, Trump maintained documents from the White House in a “windowless storage room,” to which Trump had previously granted access to both the FBI and lawyers representing the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Why would the FBI need to search the entire compound if the documents were known to be stored in that basement? As reported by the Post, “The demeanor of the three Justice Department lawyers who accompanied the FBI was described by one eyewitness as ‘arrogant,’ and they repeatedly told Trump representatives: ‘We have full access to everything. We can go everywhere.’”
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland held a short press conference after which he refused to take questions. He announced that the Justice Department had filed a motion to unseal the warrant and the inventory of things taken from the Trump compound. He also disclosed that he personally had approved the warrant, and assured the public that it was narrowly tailored and employed only after less-intrusive means were exhausted.
We can be skeptical of both of those statements.
Notwithstanding the attorney general’s claim of investigative discretion, the FBI “sources” anonymously leaked to its network of journalists to stem the public relations disaster that the irregular search provoked, (here, here, and here).
The FBI’s puppets in the media are now floating the narrative that criticizing the FBI’s conduct makes the critic morally responsible for any threats or violence from the outraged public.
But let us return to the search itself. For context, let’s start with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. It provides,
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Although volumes have been written interpreting this short passage, the original language is reasonably clear and useful for reviewing what we know about the FBI’s intrusion into Trump’s private home.
Question 1: How did the Justice Department Justify Searching the Entire House?
Now that the warrant and return of property have been revealed, we have some clues as to how the Justice Department justified the comprehensive search. As mentioned above, the Constitution requires the warrant “particularly” describe the place to be searched and the things to be seized. It describes the areas to be searched “include the ‘45 Office,’ all storage rooms, and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by FPOTUS (the former president of the United States) and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored.”
In other words, everything. Every drawer, every bookshelf, between mattresses, inside underwear drawers, and so on. Was the objective to retrieve official records or to intimidate and humiliate the former president by desecrating every private corner of his personal home?
The warrant also identifies the property to be seized as, “All physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 USC §§ 793 (possession of national defense information), 2071 (concealment, removal, or mutilation of records/maps), or 1519 (destruction of records).”
The warrant does not disclose why the FBI reasonably believed a search for missing boxes of records would take an FBI agent to the former First Lady’s underwear drawer. It is now being reported that an informant close to Trump guided the FBI to the location of certain documents. Yet, somehow, the FBI ended up with what resembles a general warrant with the authority to search every square foot of Mar-a-Lago. Was the FBI really looking for boxes of documents in Mrs. Trump’s wardrobe? Or was it channeling Paulie Walnuts in seeking to deliberately humiliate the Trumps through this gratuitous invasion of privacy?
If the FBI was being guided by an informant, it certainly did not focus its search. According to one report, “A source familiar told Fox News that FBI agents went to Mar-a-Lago and looked in every single office and safe, and grabbed documents and boxes without going through them on the property. They took boxes and documents to go through them later.”
As noted by the U.S. Supreme Court, “The Fourth Amendment was in large part a reaction to the general warrants and warrantless searches that had so alienated the colonists.” So the first thing I’ll be looking for in the warrant and application is the Justice Department’s justification for searching the entire residence.
Question 2: Did the FBI really exhaust all of the less-intrusive alternatives?
According to Fox News, Trump willingly cooperated with investigators to ensure mutual agreement on a process for securing the records during negotiations over the materials that should be returned to the National Archives. As Fox reported,
Those investigators toured the area of the Florida resort where some documents were stored, then briefly viewed and took custody of a small amount of potentially sensitive material. Separate sources told Fox News that federal investigators had spoken with at least one person who relayed the possibility of more sensitive national security material in that storage room and other areas of the property.
FBI officials, that day, asked to see a storage facility where the records were located. The FBI asked that staff put a lock on the storage room, which they later did.
This source said Trump and his staff were, and are, committed to being in compliance with the Presidential Records Act, which requires presidential administrations to preserve certain documents.
As the Justice Department’s inspector general has noted, “The [attorney general] Guidelines . . . require that ‘least intrusive’ means or method be ‘considered’ when selecting investigative techniques.” The Constitution guarantees freedom from unreasonable search. How can a search be reasonable if it is unnecessary?
Nothing in the search warrant or property receipt indicates that the FBI found the records in any location other than the dedicated basement room to which the FBI had already been given access. Did the warrant affidavit claim the records were in imminent danger of being destroyed or shared with foreign adversaries? We don’t know because the FBI is predictably keeping its justifications secret.
In its review of the Russia collusion hoax FISA warrants, the OIG faulted the Justice Department for using confidential human sources (spies) and a search warrant to obtain information from Carter Page while ignoring Page’s offer to voluntarily submit to an FBI interview. The explanation is simple. The FBI didn’t care what Page had to say and he wasn’t the real target of the search. Thus, an interview with FBI agents would have completely frustrated the pretext to use Page’s communications as a window into the Trump campaign.
So when it applied for the warrants, the FBI withheld from the judge evidence of Carter Page’s history of cooperation. This included Page’s offer of an interview and a history of reliably providing information to the CIA about the very matter for which the FBI said it wanted a warrant. When Page later publicly disclosed his work with the CIA, the FBI reacted by falsifying an email from the CIA to contradict this claim and submitted that false evidence to the court to justify continued surveillance.
In the instance of the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the stench of political retribution permeates the entire operation. Thus, one should closely scrutinize whether the FBI might have failed to disclose Trump’s history of cooperating with the probe when it applied for the warrant. Unfortunately, we don’t have that information within the warrant and receipt of property because the Justice Department withheld the supporting affidavit. The FBI has done nothing to acquit itself by failing to demonstrate it complied with the “least intrusive” doctrine.
Question 3: What did the FBI take and where did it find it?
Although the FBI had exclusive access to Mar-a-Lago from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., it apparently scooped up documents indiscriminately without bothering to ascertain whether the records were the target of the search. The receipt of property contains 39 separate entries. With 30 agents working for over 9 hours, there should have been more than enough time and manpower to describe in particular detail what it needed to seize, and to leave behind materials not relevant to the search. What we hoped to see is a detailed description of documents gathered demonstrating that the FBI had reasonably calculated those to be the records sought.
But the FBI instead employed vague descriptions such as, “miscellaneous secret documents,” or “binder of photos.” The receipt for property does not disclose where the FBI located the seized items. Although the FBI seized 21 boxes, it did not state on the receipt for property that it had bothered to confirm that any of these boxes had anything to do with presidential records. The FBI’s sloppy, slapdash onsite inventory of the seized property means the FBI potentially seized and now has access to private Trump papers that have nothing to do with the dispute at hand. Many suspect that the FBI used the search as a pretext to look for dirt on Trump that could be used in connection with a January 6 prosecution.
Every president has taken records with him which he conveyed to himself as president. The Clintons were famously required to return or purchase more than $100,000 in gifts they took with them as they left the White House. As noted by Stripes.com, “all recent administrations have had some violations of federal records laws—most often involving the use of unofficial email and telephone accounts.” It’s hard to escape the perception that the Justice Department is treating Trump differently from other former presidents.
In his fatuous four-minute public statement on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke up to defend the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago. The Department of Justice has posted the transcript of Garland’s remarks here.
At NRO, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty respond in the column “Why the Public Is Skeptical of Garland’s Mar-a-Lago Story.” They offer “four legitimate reasons Americans think something crassly political has just transpired.” They speak from experience and they know what they are talking about.
Yoo and Delahunty take up the sordid recent history of the FBI and the Department of Justice toward the end of their column. They do not directly address Garland’s condemnation of those who question the behavior of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Referring to “recent unfounded attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department agents and prosecutors,” one might think he dozed off during the four years of the Trump administration.
Garland asserted: “I will not stand by silently when their integrity is unfairly attacked.” His bravado was not such that he could stand up to questions following his brief statement. Indeed, he silently skulked off.
Garland professed to be bound to silence by canons of professional or departmental responsibility: “[O]ur ethical obligations prevent me from providing further details as to the basis of the search at this time….This is all I can say right now.”
For reasons 1, 3, and 4 to doubt the bona fides of the raid, Yoo and Delahunty cite its timing, White House political pressure, and the impression of improper political motivation already created by the Justice Department and FBI. The second of the four reasons they offer for doubting the legitimacy of the raid is “the leaks”:
Garland had hardly vacated the podium when leaks from the inside began to flow to administration-friendly media. These allowed the agencies to put their self-serving spin on the raid without having to take responsibility for, or permit questioning of, those claims. Garland knows how Washington, D.C., works. He apparently wants to have it both ways: a trickle of official information but a gusher of selective, off-the-record disclosure.
If so, Garland’s invocation of “ethical obligations” is not to be taken seriously.
If, on the other hand, Garland is to be taken seriously and “ethical obligations” truly prevented him from saying more, one might infer that the leakers among Garland’s ranks belie his defense of the Department of Justice. He must be surrounded by lawyers and agents for whom the phrase “ethical obligations” is a contradiction in terms.
Even if Garland hadn’t considered politics, he might have thought of the declining credibility of his organization, especially after its shameful spying on Trump in the 2016 election.
Gallup has tracked Americans’ confidence in 14 institutions for decades, and the criminal-justice system ranks close to the bottom of the barrel.
The FBI raided Trump’s house at Mar-a-Lago Monday.
It won the confidence of just 20% of respondents last year, beating out only big business, TV news and Congress, which registered a measly 12%. Small businesses topped the chart, enjoying the confidence of 70% of respondents, with the military second, at 69%.
The public mood was apparently news to Garland, who remained out of sight for three days after the raid despite demands for an explanation. He still has not grasped the fact that it is a blaring conflict of interest for Joe Biden’s AG to raid the home of Biden’s predecessor and his likely opponent in 2024.
As I have noted, The New York Times reported in April that Biden was frustrated that Garland had not moved faster to prosecute Trump. That puts Biden’s fingerprints on the raid, with his wish becoming Garland’s command.
When he finally spoke, Garland was a lousy lawyer for his case. He foolishly took no questions as he read a statement that claimed absolute rectitude on his part and scolded critics of the FBI.
He insisted he could not, under law, give any information about the search, but said he would petition the judge to release the warrant and a list of what was taken. The search, he emphasized, was by-the-book and had absolutely no political dimension.
And then the leaks started. Within hours, and long before the warrant was made public, headlines from numerous outlets friendly to the administration began with words like “FBI seized” and “FBI recovered” before going on to describe how many boxes of documents agents took and what was in them.
The Washington Post was first to claim some documents were “relating to nuclear weapons” and said the search “underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.”
Shades of Russia, Russia, Russia right there. Subsequent headlines that Trump could face charges under the Espionage Act confirmed the government’s intent to again paint him as a traitor.
Trump remains the most-desired Republican candidate for 2024.
‘Anonymous’ dodge
As Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
Indeed it is and, naturally, all the sources were anonymous, with The Washington Post saying they “spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.”
In plain English, the leakers were committing a crime by disclosing the info Garland said was confidential. But breathes there a fool who believes the AG is upset and plans to find and prosecute them?
Trump’s out of office, but that hasn’t dimmed the left’s desire to destroy him. Sadly, the cutthroat ranks now include the sitting attorney general.
Their excuse, er, reasoning is that Trump is a danger to democracy, even as they marshal an unprecedented use of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies against him.
In truth, the real danger to democracy is the government itself when it abuses its power for partisan purposes.
While the possibility that Trump broke laws by taking and holding the documents cannot be dismissed, the hysterical reaction of a raid belies the fact that the government had retrieved 15 boxes of documents from him in January and negotiations continued until June.
The timing is doubly curious because the raid comes just three months before voters get to decide who controls Congress. If Dems lose, GOP investigations of Biden and Garland are certain.
Part of the evidence in Trump’s favor is that Hillary Clinton got a much sweeter deal with her use of a private server to send and receive classified documents. There was no raid of her house, and even the disgraced James Comey, then the FBI director, did not trust then-AG Loretta Lynch to honestly pursue the case.
Comey, for once, was right, with Clinton getting a free pass not long after Lynch met with Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, we apparently are watching a replay of that scam with the federal probe of Hunter Biden. An investigation in its fifth year, with not a single charge, is more of a cover-up than an investigation.
The contrasting images of the week capture the Dems’ twin abuses of power: Dozens of federal agents swarming over Trump’s home while Hunter jets off with the Big Guy under the protection of federal agents and the military.
They are not just playing with politics. They are playing with fire.
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