Much of the time, flipping between MSNBC, Fox and CNN would lead one to think each was from a different country, or perhaps universe, given what they deemed the big news story of the moment. Not so yesterday about dinner time, when each obsessed over a story that had never before been reported, the home of a former president of the United States had been raided pursuant to a search warrant.
Granted, Trump’s tenure was replete with “firsts,” from impeachments to insurrection to emoluments to his beautiful health care plan that’s going to be revealed right after infrastructure week. And now we can add search warrant to the list, which involves a series of decisions, from Main Justice deciding to seek it, a Magistrate Judge finding sufficient probable cause to issue it, and the FBI executing it. Anyone who clings to the belief that these decisions were made lightly or frivolously is foolish. You can bet that Mag parsed the application within an inch of its life to make sure it was bulletproof.
As of now, the rumor is that it related to the boxes of confidential documents that magically ended up at Mar-a-Lago, curiously abbreviated MAL, which bring Mal Maison to my mind. Why a search warrant is unknown. Did the government believe the return of the 15 boxes, which should never have been there or flushed down the toilet, burned in the fireplace or otherwise destroyed, was inadequate? Did it believe there would be a lack of cooperation with a request or subpoena? Did they suspect destruction?
But this was all about papers. Sure, secret papers, but so what? Without knowing what the papers were about, or to what nefarious purpose the papers would be put, they’re just papers. Nobody gets all worked up about papers. Plus, Trump being president, he was empowered to see the papers, and for better or worse, didn’t suddenly forget all he was while behind the Resolute Desk they day he got sent packing.
And they even broke into his safe, which of course they did because that’s what you do when executing a search warrant, even if it’s a mystery to Trump like pretty much everything else that happens in government, law or polite company. But some, other than Trump, haven’t take it well.
“I’ve seen enough,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, wrote in a statement that he posted online. “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”
And the online nutjobs are doing their best.
This is, of course, irrelevant to any rational consideration of whether the raid was warranted factually or legally, but it’s the best they’ve got given the lack of facts or logical arguments.
If Trump committed a crime, then he is no less culpable than any other person. Neither he nor Mar-a-Lago is immune from search, from the constraints of the same legal system and procedures that apply to everyone else. Yes, it’s unprecedented, but then, so was Trump in how little he either knew, understood or respected the law.
On the other hand, if you’re going to kill the king (only a quote, chill out), you best not miss. If this is only about some secret papers that never found their way back to the archives, is that the sort of “crime” that will deliver a knock-out punch? Indeed, that may not even relate back to Trump, at least provably, as it’s hard to imagine him risking a papercut by touching a piece of paper, or reading it if it contained so many squiggly lines that it would give him a headache. So if there, it could be hard if not impossible to connect it directly to him anyway.
So why? Raiding MAL is akin to throwing a bomb into the other sides headquarters, like it or not. Not only does it have to be legally justified, which I’ve no doubt it is as nobody would have done something so inflammatory unless they had this sucker locked down tight as a drum, but justifiable, meaning that the end result would be accepted by enough of a nation that this first, this unprecedented raid, would not come off as pure political theater.
Flipping through the cable news last night, MSNBC was losing their heads over this being “it,” they finally got him. Fox was losing their heads over this, ironically, being the overthrow of democracy as the Dems were taking out Fearless Leader. And on CNN, even Elie Honig got the law right, proving there’s a first time for everything.
Where do we go from here?**
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
**Save your space alien and Soros conspiracy theories for your pals at reddit s/tinfoil. TIA.
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MAL raid? Bueno raid! Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Could the explanation be as simple as DOJ simply becoming fed up with Il Douche’s stalling/ not turning over documents as ordered?
You mean other than the fact the the documents were discovered when the boxes were turned over to the National Archives, who then reported the presence of classified material in them to the DOJ which launched an investigation?
“But this was all about papers. Sure, secret papers, but so what? Without knowing what the papers were about, or to what nefarious purpose the papers would be put, they’re just papers. Nobody gets all worked up about papers.”
Yes they do get worked up.
Just last week a co-worker told of someone he saw that had slipped up and accidentally took home one sheet of paper that shouldn’t have left the SCIF. He brought it back the next day, self reported his mistake, said that no one else knew about it or saw the paper. They still gave him a year in the brig. Later reduced to 6 months.
Do other ex-presidents have some papers tucked away in some desk draw at their home? Could be, but they are not that stupid to somehow let it out that they took things from the Whitehouse that should have remained.
Someone in his current staff is very dumb, or has blown the whistle on him.
Why are they doing this to him? Maybe they have rumors of other bigger things and this is just foot in the door.
They better not miss is an understatement, if they do miss, how does DOJ ever recover any sort of reputation of being a non political actor?
{**} !@&*^%!!….come on, man! Another opportunity for great comedy and snarky replies nipped in the bud…
As for Trump, can’t wait to find out what’s on those papers. As for the nutjobs, now’s probably a good time to start a sincere conversation about criminal justice reform. Or maybe just poke fun at them on Twitter for being aligned with what they’ve imagined Antifa’s position to be. I’ll probably go with the latter.
If the documents are really sensitive, we may never find out what they are, just Document1 in the custody of Individual1.
My totally uneducated, wild-ass guess is if they are important enough to raid MAL, they are probably that sensitive.
It’s a binary choice.
Either they they are finally serious about going after the criminal enterprise that is Trump or it’s the end of our republic.
Nothing is going to change the minds on either side.
Why can’t it be both?
Kurt
Maybe the justification was nailed down. Maybe DOJ is a partisan weapon. Eventually, the public should find out, but given the times it is premature to speculate whether this particular raid was or was not brought off in accordance with law.
Humm. CYA or the truth. You decide.
…….
Kash Patel, a former top Trump administration official, told Breitbart News on Wednesday that a report claiming classified materials were found at Mar-a-Lago is misleading and that the documents were actually already declassified by then-President Donald Trump, but the classification markings had not been updated.
“Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves,” Patel told Breitbart News in a phone interview.
“The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified,” Patel said. “I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information.’”
Dear Mr Greenfield,
I note where you wrote, “…a Magistrate Judge finding sufficient probable cause to issue it,” and “You can bet that Mag parsed the application within an inch of its life to make sure it was bulletproof.”
The problem is that the spplication can appear to be “bulletproof” to the Magistrate and at the same time there can be false information in the application. The search warrant involved with Breonna Taylor’s death is a current example. Not too long ago there were several FISA warrants that were issued and even then head of the FBI, Jim Comey, stated that it was impossible for such a thing to be wrongly issued. Yet it turned out that Inspector General Horowitz found “17 significant errors” in the applications. False and “doctored” information had been used.
I am not saying that this is what happened with the MAL search warrant, but such things do happen.
Sincerely
Mark Brooks
Malvern
St Elizabeth
Jamaica
Unless this standard is immediately applied to other former executives it will stink of partisan hackery.
Senior executives routinely make this kind of error (emails anyone) and are at best given a smack on the wrist.
Im down with making the standard fair but it has to be everyone.
Any mention of classified papers, Secret, Top Secret, TSSCI, SCIFs, etc. is bunk. Presidents are the ultimate declassification authority. Trump taking anything to MAL while he is president is no different than a president holding a press conference and showing satellite imagery or mentioning a military secret gathered by intelligence to a foreign leader. Whatever he took (unlike Berger, Come, Petraeus, et al.) was de facto declassified the moment he left a secure facility.
There is no legal issue unless the documents were reclassified, and even then the authority and procedure to retrieve distributed formerly classified documents and their copies is not settled.
I know it is hard for some here to understand how the other half of the country thinks, but Garland just stepped on it big time. He just made Darth Cheeto a martyr and mobilized supporters and sympathetic voters.
Whether Garland just stepped on it big time remains to be seen, but there is a mechanism by which documents are declassified, and it does not involve the president or ex-president doing voodoo, contrary to ignorant belief. You would look a lot less moronic if you were aware of it.
Your use of moronic is ironic.
Feel free to reread my original comment. I specifically referred to reclassified documents and “the authority and procedure to retrieve distributed formerly classified documents.” That policy, which you conflate with the “mechanism by which documents are declassified”, is indeed not settled.
As a retired former military intelligence officer who held a TS/SCI clearance for three decades, I am familiar with (and aware of) the declassification process. POTUS is at the top.
The president has the authority to declassify at will, but that doesn’t mean that classified documents are “per se” declassified because the president retained classified docs there were never declassified after his term expired. If the president did, in fact, declassify the docs, there would be a manifestation of some objective sort of his having done so. Just because he has them when he has no authority to possess them does not make them declassified.
Sorry, spooky guy, but just because he could doesn’t mean he did.
I know nothing about these processes, but it seems logical that a president is not constrained to use form 8432.x42 (or any other invention of the executive branch that he leads) to exercise his presidential prerogatives. A president could simply chant “Baruch Ata Declassified” and declassified it is. (I am informed, such as it is, by the Kushner security clearance imbroglio of 2017. The president is the ultimate decider, as GWB put it.) Thus, even if you are correct, David, that SOME process has to be followed, the mere fact that the FBI could not find proof of proper authorization does not mean that proper authorization did not happen, especially when the bar is so low. In other words, the presence of papers at Mar-a-Lago without receipts authorizing their presence there is not (to my ears) a prima facie argument that a crime was committed.
Whenever your comment begins “I know nothing,” it’s an excellent moment to stop, reconsider and delete.
That was a sop. I should have said “ I am less credentialed than you guys. “. (And to keep the veneer of pseudonymity I would have to leave it at that.) do you disagree with the logic, or just that the declassification prayer has to be in vulgate Latin ?
Your attempt at legal analysis was…unsatisfying.
“because he could doesn’t mean he did”
Sounds like probable cause to me lol
I believe this is what the kids call a “self own,” and you just don’t realize it.
I can see a Trump-DeSantis ticket shaping up here. If Trump does get nuked somehow, then DeSantis takes over and issues an unconditional pardon a la Nixon-Ford. On the other hand, if Trump survives, then DeSantis is a shoo-in for 2028.
It’s an odd world when Ted Cruz – by all accounts the most hated individual in Congress – repeats Andrew Cuomo:
https://www.instagram.com/p/ChCsGcaAqTl/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
I do not see how the government agencies safely traverse the different treatment of candidate Clinton and President Trump
Speaking from the left, I’ll settle for President Trump enduring 1/10th the scrutiny Sec. Clinton endured for the crime of mishandling classified materials, but I hope he gets the full treatment.
Will you be happy with the same result?
I will go ahead and dip my toe back into the pool, having been summoned by the mention of Reddit in the post.
I see a great deal of talk in the comments about nutjobs, partisanship, Merrick Garland has crossed the line this time, and St. Bad Orange Man the martyr.
We don’t know anything yet. This could range from the Bad Orange Man requesting and receiving documents from the National Archive and not returning them in a timely fashion, which would be federal equivalent failing to return a video to the library by the due date, all of the way to the former president raving on the phone with Alex Jones, promising to send him top secret documents in his possession that proves that the election was stolen, which would be a big problem for the Bad Orange Man.
We have seen unprecedented actions from the presidency from 2017-2021, but we also saw unprecedented actions from the rest of the government in response to the former president. Basically, the bureaucracy, the Deep State, whatever you want to call it, saw what the voters gave it, and it tried to vomit up the Bad Orange Man to purge him from the body politic.
This time, I don’t think that we can reliably speculate about what has happened here because Trump is capable of blundering into any mess, and the FBI/DOJ, even when the former president was in office, was capable of taking any action, however petty and unethical, to tarnish him and impair his presidency.
What worries me, is the damage that this might do to our republic. If we create the impression that former presidents are fair game for prosecutions (and I am aware that the responses to this will be, “But Trump!” and “We won’t use this against anyone else!”), we are increasing the likelihood that in another 2020 election scenario, the sitting president will refuse to leave office, which I think would be much worse than whatever the Bad Orange Man has likely done. However, I could be wrong, and he may be sitting on boxes of evidence about crimes committed after the last presidential election.
So, I am a little concerned.
Classified? Well. It is a felony to remove any document “filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States,” whether it was classified or not. See 18 USC 2071. Section 2071 doesn’t say that a document otherwise within the statute must have been classified.
Of course, if nothing was classified this wouldn’t sound as bad.
Curious how nothing in the post mentioned classified, and yet it became the causal trend in the comments. People are strange.
SHG.
“As of now, the rumor is that it related to the boxes of confidential documents that magically ended up at Mar-a-Lago…”
Well, you did mention confidential documents and anyone that’s been around classified documents will automatically think of classified material. Plus, we read and watch the news and that’s what they are yammering about, so it’s a logical leap to classified material.
Good try. HG.