Minneapolis public school teachers of color will have additional job protections this upcoming school year under a new contract that would allow them to keep their jobs rather than white instructors with more seniority.
The labor agreement’s intent was to protect “underrepresented populations” and keep the district’s predominantly white staff from becoming more homogenous, a report said Monday.
About 60% of Minneapolis students are non-white compared to 16% of the district’s tenured teachers and 27% of its probationary teachers, according to a June Minneapolis Star Tribune report.
The agreement states that teachers of color “may be exempted from district-wide layoff[s] outside seniority order,” according to Minnesota outlet Alpha News, which published language from the contract Sunday.
“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing [reducing] a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population,” the agreement reportedly read.
The agreement said that “past discrimination” had made the district’s teaching staff “underrepresented” to the community “and resulted in a lack of diversity of teachers,” according to the article.
The teachers union and the school district “mutually agreed” on the deal, a Minneapolis Public Schools spokesperson reportedly said.
A representative of the Upper Midwest Law Center told Alpha News the agreement was “unconstitutional.”
“The [collective bargaining agreement] … openly discriminates against white teachers based only on the color of their skin, and not their seniority or merit,” James Dickey, senior trial counsel at UMLC, reportedly said.
“Minneapolis teachers and taxpayers who oppose government-sponsored racism like this should stand up against it.”
The contract was one of the first of its kind in the nation, and a “huge move forward for the retention of teachers of color,” union leaders told the Star Tribune.
“It can be a national model, and schools in other states are looking to emulate what we did,” said Edward Barlow, a member of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers executive board.
The more than four dozen teachers slated to lose their jobs this fall largely due to enrollment declines would not be impacted by the affirmative action measure, the paper said.
Record numbers of migrants are being arrested while crossing the southern U.S. border with Mexico, a sustained surge of single men and families from across Latin America either seeking asylum or work, according to new figures Monday from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Border Patrol agents have made about 1.82 million arrests at the southern border so far in the government’s fiscal year, which runs from October to the end of September. The number beats the record set last fiscal year, which was 1.66 million apprehensions in the year ending September 2021.
With about two months left in the agency’s fiscal year, full-year arrests are expected to break the two million mark for the first time, analysts said. . .
• So another congressional delegation is visiting Taiwan (or as we old-timers still like to call it, “Free China,” or even “Nationalist China”), and Beijing responds with more drills and live fire exercises in the neighborhood. I think I see a strategy here: get China to use up all its munitions with successive congressional visits.
Stoking public fears over violent crime is central to the conservative pitch. The annual summer spike in violent crime in many cities makes it easier for Republicans to harp on the problem, as voters become understandably worried by shootings. But the right has been noticeably silent on one salient dimension of the crime problem: Heat waves worsen violence, and to be safer from violent crime we need to address climate change. . . research has made the links to heat waves much clearer, suggesting that without intervention global warming will lead to more murders.
It’s real, in the once proud New Republic this week. I’ll meet them halfway: how about we build a new generation of solar-powered prisons.
• Speaking of wind and solar power, the recently passed inflation-fighting climate bill was enacted without the usual process of committee hearings, government agency (like the CBO) and independent expert analysis, and extensive floor debate that have always accompanied major energy and environmental legislation. If they had passed the bill in the usual way, perhaps they might have considered this tidbit reported by the Los Angeles Times:
Princeton University researchers estimate that zeroing out U.S. carbon emissions by 2050 could require installing solar panels and wind turbines across more than 225,000 square miles, an area much bigger than California.
Let’s talk Washington. What is there to be learned about national performance from one of the most reliably blue states in the union? A lot, says Sean Trende, who’s been studying Democratic primaries there for more than a decade as bellwethers of how well or poorly Dems will do nationally in the fall. Washington is unusual in that it uses a “jungle primary” system, where all candidates from both parties appear on the same ballot and the top two finishers advance to the general election in November. It’s also unusual in that it holds its primaries late in the campaign, in August, which makes them a bit more useful to projecting the national mood in November than, say, a primary held in April might be.
It turns out that the total share of the vote received by all Democratic candidates in the jungle primary predicts pretty well the total share of the vote that’ll go to the top Democratic candidate on the ballot in Washington state in the fall. In fact, per Politico, Dems have tended to overperform a bit in November in recent elections relative to their primary vote. The numbers:
A few months ago, pre-Dobbs, when the GOP seemed poised for a red tidal wave this fall, Republicans toyed with the idea of making a play for Patty Murray’s Senate seat in Washington. Based on the above results, that would be foolish. If Dems in the state are combining for 55.4 percent of the vote in the primary, we’d expect Murray to do slightly better than that in November, not worse, making the race a lost cause for the right. Their money is better spent on more competitive races, especially with groups like the NRSC experiencing a bit of a cash crunch.
Trende’s analysis is more involved than Politico’s and is worth reading in full, although both come to the same conclusion — the results in Washington point to a reasonably good year for the GOP this fall but not to a tidal wave. “This year, the aggregate Democratic vote across the state’s House primaries was more than 5 percentage points worse than Democrats’ performance in the 2018 ‘blue wave’ year,” Politico notes. “But it was also more than 5 percentage points better than Democrats performed in either 2010 or 2014, two Republican wave years.” The 55.4 percent share of the vote that Dems got in the recent primaries was several points less than Joe Biden’s share of the vote in Washington in 2020, an encouraging sign for the GOP, but it wasn’t starkly less like it was during Barack Obama’s two midterm elections. One Republican analyst said that points to something closer to a “neutral” midterm environment in November than a red wave.
Trende’s take on the national outlook based on Washington’s results:
The model suggests that [Washington] Democrats should run, on average, about 3.8% behind Joe Biden’s vote share from 2020. That would reflect one of the larger expected midterm drop-offs in our dataset, akin to 2014 and 1994, but not what we saw in 2010. (Notably, though, Barack Obama won in 2008 by a larger margin that Biden won in 2020 or Clinton won in 1992.) We should also remember that error margins are real, and that although the model performs well, it is still imperfect.
Finally, can we extrapolate from this to the national vote? If Washington Democrats are expected to run more or less 3.8 points behind Biden in their districts, does that mean that all Democrats are expected to run more or less 3.8 points behind Biden in their districts? If so, this would actually translate to modest Republican gains; they’d win the popular vote by about three points.
How you feel about that depends on whether you view the glass as half full of half empty. Half full: It remains very likely that Republicans will flip the House, thanks in part to the surprising gains they made in the 2020 election. Dems have a bare majority in the chamber right now; if Trende’s right about them losing the national popular vote in House races this fall, it’s a cinch that at least a handful of competitive blue seats will turn red. And if they do, that means Joe Biden’s legislative agenda is dead for the final two years of his first term. Nothing will pass a Kevin-McCarthy-run House.
Half empty: Despite the worst inflation in 40 years, Republican control of the Senate remains in doubt. Poor candidate selection plus a “Roe effect” plus declining gas prices means there may be just enough votes left on the table for Democrats to squeak through in states like Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. And if they do, that means the power to confirm any new Biden nominees in 2023 and 2024 will remain in Democratic hands. If John Roberts surprises everyone by declaring that he’s had enough of the Supreme Court, Dems are assured a solidly liberal replacement as chief justice.
All in all: Could be worse, could be better, as is usually the case in life. But if Republicans prove unable to flip a 50/50 Senate in a cycle where the incumbent president is polling at 40 percent and inflation is rampant, they’ll spend the next decade kicking themselves for it. And they should.
Exit question: Is “defund the FBI” a smart midterm message for the GOP? A key reason Republicans did better than expected in 2020 is because progressives spent months demanding that America defund the police, sending frightened working-class voters fleeing into the GOP’s camp. Now here’s MAGA demanding that federal law enforcement be abolished, at least temporarily, because they’re mad that the feds insisted on retrieving classified documents from Trump which he had no right to take. “I’m impressed Democrats finally got us to say, ‘Defund the FBI,’” Dan Crenshaw told Axios recently. “That makes you look unserious, when you start talking like that.”
Yesterday, Donald Trump announced that during the Mar-a-Lago raid, FBI agents “stole” his three passports, one of which was expired. The Department of Justice initially tried to deny this claim, or at least weasel out of it. Via RedState:
This is typical of how the Biden Department of Justice and the FBI operate. They piously assert that they can’t comment on much of anything publicly, and then leak falsehoods and half-truths to friendly and gullible media outlets. The careful wording of this particular leak is obvious: the FBI “is NOT in possession” of Trump’s passports–not that they didn’t take them, as Trump said.
A word of explanation: Trump and his agents have pointed out that some of the materials seized by the FBI were covered by attorney-client privilege. This happens a lot. The usual practice, as I understand it, is to have a team not associated with the investigation (the “filter agents”) review the materials and remove privileged documents before the investigative team digs into them. Apparently the “filter agents” removed the passports and the FBI offered them back to Trump. Is this consistent with the DOJ leak claiming that the FBI was “NOT in possession” of the passports? Only if the filter team did not consist of FBI employees, and even then, only if you construe “possession” with misleading narrowness.
The next question is whether the passports were within the scope of the search warrant. DOJ tells us the FBI was searching for “nuclear secrets,” which wouldn’t likely be hiding in a former president’s diplomatic passport. But the terms of the search were extraordinarily broad. The FBI was authorized to carry away from Mar-a-Lago:
a) Any physical documents with classification markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes;
So if the FBI agents who conducted the raid found one or more documents with classification markings, they were authorized to carry away not just those documents, and not just the containers or boxes that held such documents, but any containers or boxes “found together” with them. That would include any container or box in Trump’s basement, and might have been construed more broadly by the agents, to include any containers or boxes at Mar-a-Lago. It would be interesting to know where Trump’s passports were kept.
The incident of the stolen passports reveals the extraordinary breadth of the Mar-a-Lago raid, and I think can fairly be said to cast doubt on DOJ’s self-serving claim to have been searching for “nuclear secrets.”
A curious development indeed, especially after yesterday’s pas de deux over whether the FBI took Donald Trump’s passports — and why. Trump claimed that FBI agents “stole my three Passports,” while the Department of Justice remained silent about it until late in the day.
Now there are two questions to ask after this NBC News report: why did FBI agents take them in the first place, and why did the inventory from the seizure not list them?
Passports belonging to Donald Trump have been returned to the former president after last week’s FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home, a Justice Department official told NBC News on Monday.
The FBI acknowledged it had had the passports the same day Trump said on his social media platform that FBI agents who conducted the search on Aug. 8 took them.
That’s not exactly a sterling level of accountability. It took Trump a week to notice that the passports were missing, or at least a week to go public with it. His social-media post announcing the “theft” appeared yesterday at 12:22 ET; the raid took place on the morning of Monday, August 8. The FBI left with a dozen or so boxes of material, which sounds like a lot but is actually rather paltry in legal cases, as Andrew McCarthy noted in an earlier column at National Review. If this search was as acutely necessary as the DoJ claims, shouldn’t the FBI have realized they had his passports almost immediately — and returned them days ago?
That’s a third question. Let’s stick with the first two. Why would the FBI have taken Trump’s passports as part of a search purportedly aimed at retrieving classified material? Passports don’t have anything to do with Trump’s retention of allegedly classified material, nor would they have any material connection to the DoJ’s investigation into January 6, which this search warrant appears to facilitate sotto voce. Law enforcement can’t just take a person’s passport without a judicial order restricting a person’s travel. Trump hasn’t even been charged with any crime, let alone be made subject to such a bail condition. He has every right to travel outside the US, and every right to retain his passports.
The FBI suggested that the removal of the passports was an accident:
“In executing search warrants, the FBI follows search and seizure procedures ordered by courts, then returns items that do not need to be retained for law enforcement purposes,” the spokesperson said in a statement Monday evening that did not mention the passports.
This seems like an odd explanation. Trump almost certainly did not store his passports with the government documents that the search warrant targeted. Those are items usually stored in a secured personal space, like a safe or perhaps a locked desk drawer (or maybe a dresser drawer?). It’s not the kind of item that would have been easily swept up by accident even in a broad search, in other words. It’s possible, but appears unlikely unless this was one of the clumsiest search-and-retrieval operations conducted by the FBI.
That brings us to the second question: Why weren’t the passports listed on the inventory? FBI agents certainly know what passports look like. The inventory is a legal record of everything the FBI took out of Trump’s home in executing the search. There may be some understandable fuzziness on the identity of each and every single sheet of paper in those boxes, but passports are unique and instantly recognizable — and look nothing like the documents in question. The inventory was specific enough on August 8 to include separate entries for “handwritten note,” “Executive Grant of Clemency re: Roger Jason Stone Jr,” and two entries logging “binder of photos.”
But no one noticed three passports? Again, this either indicates that the FBI conducted this raid in an incredibly sloppy manner, or something else is afoot.
All of this raises a fourth question, too: What else did the FBI take that didn’t get inventoried and might not be germane to any legit investigation? And a fifth: Will they return anything else improperly taken and left off the inventory on their own volition — or will Trump have to make a public stink to force them to return those, too?
FBI Director Slammed For ‘Integrity’ Comments Over Trump Raid
or over a year, we’ve heard Democrats wailing about existential threats to “democracy!” Curiously, this has happened while these same Democrats in Congress have worked hand-in-glove with their fellow Democrats in the Justice Department to disregard all norms to hunt down and attempt to destroy President Joe Biden‘s chief political rival, former President Donald Trump, as well as Trump’s top aides and even his political supporters.
Last Monday, the Biden Justice Department crossed a red line by ordering an unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful FBI raid of Trump’s home and offices in Mar-a-Lago. The purported purpose of the highly controversial home raid with a brigade of 30 FBI agents—a raid Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted he personally ordered after his aides initially denied it—is related to 15 to 25 boxes of presidential records, some of which bureaucrats at the National Archives claim are classified and which Trump took to Mar-a-Lago when he left the White House over 18 months ago.
All presidents take mementos and other records when they leave office. They don’t pack their own boxes. The National Archives takes the position that almost everything is a “presidential record.” And the federal government, in general, over-classifies almost everything.
Even if Trump took classified records, that isn’t a crime. The president has the inherent constitutional power to declassify any record he wants, in any manner he wants, regardless of any otherwise-pertinent statute or regulation that applies to everyone else. The president does not need to obtain Congress’ or a bureaucrat’s permission—or jump through their regulatory or statutory hoops—to declassify anything. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in the 1988 case, Department of the Navy v. Egan : “The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.’ U.S. Const., Art. II, § 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security…flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President, and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”
Thus, if Trump left the White House with classified records, then those records are necessarily declassified by his very actions. He doesn’t need to label that decision for, or report that decision to, any bureaucrat who works for him. It is pretextual legal nonsense for the Biden Justice Department to pretend Trump broke any criminal statute. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Attorney General Garland apparently did not seek an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)—the de facto general counsel for the executive branch—before ordering this home raid of his boss’s chief political enemy. Perhaps Garland knew OLC wouldn’t give him the answer he wanted.
In 2012, former President Barack Obama secretly told the Russian president he’d have “more flexibility” to negotiate with Russia after the 2012 presidential election. To convey that message is to clearly transmit highly classified information. So why not an Espionage Act violation? Well, because Obama was the president—period.
All former presidents also get a federally funded office, called the Office of the Former President. They get lawyers and other staff, security clearances, Secret Service protection, and secure facilities (SCIFs) for the maintenance of classified records. Even if Trump had classified records, then, they were protected and secure.
At best, then, this amounts to a dispute over the Presidential Records Act. If the boxes sought by DOJ contain presidential records, then the National Archives “owns” them—but they’ll almost certainly stay with Trump in his eventual presidential library.
That’s the bureaucratic dispute. That’s it. This is not any crime (the Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute), let alone one requiring a 30-person FBI brigade and unprecedented raid of a former president’s home and office.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland explains to reporters that he will not take questions after he delivered a statement at the U.S. Department of Justice August 11, 2022 in Washington, D.C.DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
It is routine for any Office of the Former President to negotiate with the National Archives. The Archives could have also alerted Congress. The Biden Justice Department could have filed a civil lawsuit. Or the Biden Justice Department could have sought more subpoenas. Instead, DOJ went nuclear, with its unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful home raid—even knowing Trump had already been holding these records at Mar-a-Lago for 18 months. So why now?
To put this in perspective, former President Bill Clinton stole more than $190,000 in china, flatware, rugs, sofas, and other personal gifts from the White House. The Clintons eventually caved to public pressure and paid $86,000 for the items. There was no FBI raid.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set up an illegal home server containing some of our nation’s most classified records. She openly admitted to stealing and destroying records herself, putting our national security at risk. There was no FBI raid. In fact, the FBI never even questioned her.
To add insult to injury, the Biden Justice Department obtained this unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful home raid warrant from U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart of West Palm Beach. Reinhart had just recently recused himself on June 22, 2022, in Trump’s civil lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. What’s more, in 2017, Reinhart blasted Trump’s integrity on Facebook: “Donald Trump doesn’t have the moral stature to kiss John Lewis‘s feet.” So, what changed over the last two months to make Reinhart’s clear judicial bias (somehow) go away?
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently testified that the FBI was too busy to stop dangerous and illegal intimidation campaigns outside Supreme Court justices’ homes. This was after an attempted assassin was thankfully arrested outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh‘s home. The FBI apparently didn’t have the time to investigate actual threats to the lives of constitutional officers, but it had plenty of time to raid the home of a former president over an 18-month-old records dispute—with which Trump publicly stated he was fully cooperating.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Chris Wray, the Biden National Security Division, and the rest of the Biden DOJ are dangerously blinded by their obsession with President Trump, his aides, and his supporters.
Attorney General Garland attempted to defend the indefensible in his political press conference last Thursday. Garland left more questions than answers. As a former federal judge and prosecutor, he should be ashamed of himself for so recklessly politicizing the Justice Department. And the politicized, highly inappropriate, inaccurate leaks out of the Justice Department about the underlying grand jury investigation further demonstrate the Biden regime is out of control in its pursuit of punishing a past and likely-future political rival of President Biden.
House Republicans must impeach Attorney General Garland and FBI Director Wray for their unprecedented and destructive politicization of the Justice Department, when they reclaim power in January. And over the long term, House and Senate Republicans must dismantle and rebuild the FBI, so political raids like this never happen again. We cannot allow our law enforcement agencies to become third-world political hit squads.
Mike Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, is the founder and president of the Article III Project (A3P). A3P defends constitutionalist judges and the rule of law.
Editor’s Note: Norman Eisen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was former President Barack Obama’s ethics czar and was special impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in 2019-2020. Asha Rangappa is a senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. She is a former special agent in the FBI, specializing in counterintelligence investigations. Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy. The views in this commentary belong to the authors. View more opinion at CNN.CNN —
A week of stunning developments for the possible criminal liability of former President Donald Trump and his circle was capped off with this weekend’s news that a Trump lawyer had signed a statement this summer saying that all material marked as classified in the former President’s possession had been returned. Together with earlier revelations, this latest piece of the puzzle points us to the direction in which the Department of Justice is headed – and when.
Norman Eisen
Asha Rangappa
Dennis Aftergut
First, with the search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence now public, it shows the possibility of alleged crimes that are significant. The warrant is based upon probable cause to believe, first, that taking large quantities of materials to Mar-a-Lago violated the core federal criminal document preservation statute related to presidential records. It forbids the willful concealment, removal, or destruction of documents – classified or not – belonging to the government of the United States. The maximum penalty is three years’ imprisonment.
More serious still is the possible violation of the federal Espionage Act, also listed on the warrant. Its violation carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Individuals are subject to conviction under the act if they willfully retain and fail to deliver information “relating to the national defense” upon the demand of a federal officer entitled to receive such information that has come into the individuals’ possession.
This statute comes into play because the FBI retrieved 11 sets of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago last Monday. Information is marked “secret” if its unauthorized release would cause “serious damage to national security.” Information that would cause “exceptionally grave damage to national security” is marked “top secret.” If information is marked “TS/SCI,” it is even more highly protected – “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,” meaning that it comes from sensitive sources or methods.
In short, while all the material recovered could be considered stolen government property, the classified documents that the FBI retrieved and that were marked “top secret” and “various classified/TS/SCI” are of special concern. Although the Espionage Act does not require that “information related to the national defense” be classified, these highly sensitive documents would likely fall under the definition of “information relating to the national defense” under the Espionage Act.
Finally, there is the offense of obstructing a pending federal investigation by concealing documents relating to that investigation. It carries the heaviest potential penalty: up to 20 years in prison. As grave as violations of the first two statutes are, interfering with a Justice Department investigation is especially serious.
Reporting has already detailed the concerning pattern of document turnover. It started with negotiations and voluntary requests from national archivists in 2021, resulting in the return of 15 boxes of materials in 2022. That was followed in the spring by a grand jury subpoena evidently compelling production of documents. Then investigators visited in June, taking still more documents with them and at some later point securing the recently reported, evidently false statement that all material marked as classified had been returned.
Neither that subpoena nor the lawyer’s June delivery produced the 11 sets of classified information that the FBI said it took from Mar-a-Lago last week.
The warrant’s release explains what Attorney General Merrick Garland was talking about on Thursday when he spoke of the “standard practice to seek less intrusive means” than a search warrant whenever possible. He was telling us that the Justice Department tried everything else (and then some) first.
Note that if Trump or others did not honestly comply with the subpoena, that’s a separate possible crime. That might be why the department reportedly subpoenaed the surveillance footage of people going in and out of the document rooms. Government officials were also understandably concerned about who had access to classified documents.
Further, if Trump and those around him, including his lawyers, made intentionally inaccurate statements to the government, they may be criminally liable for making false statements.
While this new report on a lawyer’s letter casts added light on the situation, gaps necessarily remain. As is standard operating procedure, the Justice Department has not released the FBI agent’s sworn affidavit supporting the search warrant. Such affidavits, and the evidence they contain, are closely held until soon after the DOJ files any criminal charges.
Disclosing affidavits prematurely can give away the government’s case and inform targets what investigatory routes they need to block, what evidence to destroy and what potential witnesses’ cooperation they need to forestall. That is why Garland should hold firm despite demands from some of the former President’s allies in Congress to see the affidavit.
The ordinary reasons apply with even greater force in a case involving exceptionally sensitive national security data and a highly confidential informant. In our current, hyper-charged political environment, when an armed follower of Trump’s social media site enters a Cincinnati FBI office with an apparent intent to kill, any public information on a reported Mar-a-Lago informant could easily put that person’s life in danger.
Still, Garland has adeptly brought the picture into focus with his properly terse statement and release of the warrant – while complying with the DOJ’s stringent rules on what can and cannot be said. We shouldn’t take the attorney general’s integrity and prosecutorial experience for granted. After all, we just had Bill Barr, whose distortions as attorney general of the Mueller report may have emboldened Trump’s belief in complete personal impunity from legal consequences. In the Nixon era, we had enabling Attorney Generals John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst, both of whom were convicted of crimes
Given Garland’s care to follow the rules, we are going to have to be satisfied with his disclosures for a while. We are now in the window Garland laid out in his recent memo about the DOJ avoiding any actions that could be perceived as affecting an election before it takes place. (Although the window is often referred to as a three-month one, the memo is silent as to the actual number of days.)
Trump remains one of the most polarizing characters in American politics, and any action taken could have an impact on the midterm elections. That is so even though Trump has not declared his candidacy for 2024 and is not on any ballot.
The accumulation of allegations adds to the chances that Trump might be charged. It’s not just the possible removal of documents, or even the more serious national security ones. It’s that documents appear to have been withheld again and again.
Moreover, Garland’s moves last week were not necessarily just about potential document crimes. As an earlier overview explained, the DOJ can use anything found pursuant to the search warrant to prove other possible crimes.
There are three fronts on which federal criminal investigations are likely to proceed, quietly before November but perhaps more loudly afterward: alleged document crimes, conspiracy to defraud the United States by seeking to overturn the 2020 election before January 6, 2021, and obstruction of Congress on January 6.
On Sunday, Trump may have dropped a hint that the FBI seized information related to the latter two. He complained on his site, Truth Social, that the FBI “took boxes of ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privilege material which they knowingly should not have taken.” We know that attorney-client and executive privilege arguments have loomed large in the January 6 investigations. Time will tell whether the FBI also swept up information relating to additional matters separate from the removal of classified documents.
Trump’s groundless caterwauling this past week proves he’s concerned about possible prosecution. He should be. There are just too many ongoing investigations to think that he can dodge them all.
Former President Donald Trump said the FBI “stole” three of his passports during its raid on Mar-a-Lago last Monday, calling the unprecedented search a “third world” “assault” on a “political opponent.”
“Wow! In the raid by the FBI of Mar-a-Lago, they stole my three Passports (one expired), along with everything else,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “This is an assault on a political opponent at a level never seen before in our Country.” He added: “Third World!”
Agents hauled off approximately 20 boxes of materials, after carrying out a broad search warrant at the former president’s private residence in Palm Beach, Fla.
The Mar-a-Lago search warrant and property receipt were unsealed on Friday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart. The search warrant indicated that Trump is under investigation for violating the Espionage Act, among other crimes dealing with the mishandling of classified records.
The Department of Justice on Monday said it opposed the unsealing of the affidavit that was used to secure Reinhart’s permission to obtain the search warrant.
“If disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” DOJ lawyers wrote in a filing responding to efforts by news outlets to make it public.
The property receipt showed that FBI agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents.
Trump and his allies have disputed the National Archives’ classification of those records, arguing they have all been declassified.
“It was all declassified,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on August 12. He added that the feds didn’t need to “seize” anything. “They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request,” he said.
Former National Security Council official Kash Patel, whom Trump made his representative in the National Archives dispute, said in an interview on Fox News Sunday that in October of 2020, Trump was issued a sweeping declassification order for every RussiaGate document, and every Hillary Clinton document.
“Then, on his way out of the White House, he issued further declassification orders, declassifying whole sets of documents,” Patel said on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.
“This is a key fact that most Americans are missing. President Trump, as a sitting President, has a unilateral authority for declassification,” he explained.
The list of materials seized by the feds included a leather-bound box of documents, binders of photos, handwritten notes, the executive grant of clemency for Roger Stone, and information about the President of France.
Fox News reported on Monday that some of the boxes contained “records covered by attorney-client privilege and potentially executive privilege during its raid.”
Sources familiar with the investigation told Fox News Saturday that the former president’s team was informed that boxes labeled A-14, A-26, A-43, A-13, A-33, and a set of documents—all seen on the final page of the FBI’s unsealed property receipt —contained information covered by attorney-client privilege.
Attorney-client privilege refers to a legal privilege that keeps communications between an attorney and their client confidential.
Sources told Fox News Digital that some records could be covered by executive privilege, which gives the President of the United States and other officials within the executive branch the authority to withhold certain sensitive forms of advice and consultation between the president and senior advisers.
It is unclear, at this point, if the records include communications between the former president and his private attorneys, White House counsel during the Trump administration, or a combination.
Sources told Fox News that, due to attorney-client privilege, Trump’s team asked the Justice Department for their position on whether they would support a third party, independent special master to review those records, but sources told Fox News that the DOJ notified Trump’s team that they would oppose that request.
Patel told Bartiromo on Sunday that John Carlin, the assistant attorney general under then-president Barack Obama who authorized the Russia hoax, is now the number three official at the DOJ. And Lisa Monaco, who was his superior back then, is now the number two official.
He explained that because “this is now an ongoing FBI counterintelligence operation,” they will be able to tell the American public that can’t see any of the materials that Trump declassified.
“The country is in a very dangerous position. There is tremendous anger, like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one—years of scams and witch hunts, and now this,” Trump told Fox News Digital Monday.
“There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former President of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country—at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times,” Trump said.
“If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that,” he added.
Trump told Fox News he “has not heard yet” from the Justice Department on whether they will accept his offer of help.
“I think they would want the same thing—I’ve never seen anything like this. It is a very dangerous time for our country,” Trump said. “I will do whatever I can to help the country.”
Update:
After CBS News’ Nora O’Donnell reported that a DOJ source told her the FBI was not in possession of the passports, Trump’s spokesman, Taylor Budowich, tweeted a screenshot of an email from a member of the Justice Department’s National Security Division that acknowledged the agency did indeed seize the former president’s passports.
“We have learned that the filter agents seized three passports belonging to President Trump, two expired and one being his active diplomatic passport,” wrote James Bratt, Chief of Counterintelligence and Export Control Section in the National Security Division of the DOJ, in the email.
Bratt said the agency was “returning” Trump’s passports and that they would be ready for pickup by 2 p.m., Monday. O’Donnell’s tweet came at 6:34 p.m. after the passports had been returned.
Whittaker Chambers—a Quaker—wrote to William F. Buckley in 1956 that “There is only one fully logical conservative position in the West—that of the Catholic Church.”
This may explain why a central cause of the modern left is destroying the Catholic Church above all other nodes of opposition to secular leftism. I know I am not the first to suggest that anti-Catholic bigotry is one of the few kinds of bigotry the left approves.
The latest example of this impulse is found currently in The Atlantic:
Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal. . .
The militarism also glorifies a warrior mentality and notions of manliness and male strength. This conflation of the masculine and the military is rooted in wider anxieties about Catholic manhood—the idea that it is in crisis has some currency among senior Church figures and lay organizations. . .
There’s much more in this vein, and the complete article doesn’t get any better at any point. One wonders if the author (“Daniel Panneton is a writer based in Toronto, Canada”—I’ve never heard of him either) has ever pondered the “Knight of Faith” of the middle ages, or the 19th century hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which liberal Protestant denominations have been trying to strip out of their hymnals. It is astounding that an article this bad appeared in the once-respectable Atlantic.
Turns out there’s already a meme inspired by The Atlantic:
Yes, it is strange, Elon. There is only one cable news network that covers the Biden border crisis on a day-to-day basis and that is Fox News Channel (FNC). A viewer can watch CNN and MSNBC all day long and never once hear any mention of the humanitarian crisis, much less live coverage of the illegal migrants wading across the Rio Grande River or walking across the terrain.
There is one reporter who has covered the Biden border crisis for FNC for over a year and a half. Bill Melugin shows it all, from migrants being rescued from the river to buses driving the migrants to cities away from the border by DHS to ease the overcrowding of shelters. Melugin’s Twitter bio states that he is a national correspondent for FNC based in L.A. He is a four-time EMMY winner, a three-time Edward R. Murrow winner, and a four-time RTNA Golden Mike winner.
On Sunday, Melugin was doing what he does – he reports about the activity on the border and often posts videos on his Twitter account to accompany some of the facts he delivers. One thread caught the attention of Elon Musk. He questioned Melugin’s number for just one sector of the border. Then, after confirmation from Melugin, he remarked that it is “strange that this receives very little attention in the media.”
If we had a professional media in this country, every outlet would cover the southern border, at least on a somewhat regular basis. Instead, the media ignores it until something is turned into a big headline-grabbing story, like the manufactured story of Whipgate. A manufactured narrative was developed on Twitter by a Democrat activist about mounted Border Patrol agents whipping Haitian migrants coming across the Rio Grande River by the thousands. The Democrat activist insisted that the agents were whipping them with the horse reins. It was a lie all along but the media ran with it and Democrat officials quickly jumped on the bandwagon to call for prosecution of the agents, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I will say that originally, DHS Secretary Mayorkas resisted blaming the agents and actually called for the facts to come out first, but then he quickly backtracked and spewed the administration’s false charges against them. Mayorkas is just a yes man for Biden. He threw the Border Patrol agents under the bus though he knew it was wrong.
The media doesn’t cover the Southern border because it makes the Biden administration look bad. It is visual proof that Joe Biden’s policies don’t work. It also shows Biden’s utter lack of concern about national security. His top job priority is to keep the homeland safe. He fails every single day. It is, in fact, a dereliction of duty for which he should be removed from office. But, the press will do what it can to cover for President Norms and pretend nothing is going on.
Just today, one show on FNC reported that in an interview with Rep. Tony Gonzales, (R-TX), Gonzales talked about returning from a visit to the Northern Triangle. Those are the countries (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) that supposedly the border czar, Kamala Harris, is working with on “root causes” of illegal migration. She sure isn’t touring the border to have a first-hand look at the humanitarian crisis the administration has created. But, it turns out, she isn’t even speaking with the leaders of Northern Triangle countries. Gonzales said he asked the president of Guatemala and Honduras what it will take for them to accept more migrants back into their countries. Both said the same thing to him – a phone call from Joe Biden. The presidents haven’t even received a phone call from Biden (or Harris). Like I said, it’s a dereliction of duty.
We all know what dealing with root causes mean in third world countries means. It means they want money to do the right thing. American taxpayers have sent millions of dollars in incentives to Northern Triangle countries in past years and administrations. Call it foreign aid or whatever you want to call it. Yet, here we are. They are only taking some of their citizens back when they are expelled from the U.S. and their hands are out again. Nothing changes. Biden’s bone-headed executive actions that canceled Trump’s border policies and agreements with Mexico created the Biden border crisis. It is both a humanitarian crisis and a national security crisis.
Joe Biden has never been to the border in all his decades of serving in elected office. Kamala came one time, but only briefly to El Paso and didn’t see the actual border. I would love for either of our Republican senators or Rep. Gonzales – maybe even Rep. Mayra Flores, whose husband is a Border Patrol agent – to invite Elon Musk to come to the border and take a tour of the situation along the Rio Grande River. That just might create some media buzz, however briefly.
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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