I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post how to bypass this, but it appears to akin to the limited free views fake paywall you see at some newspapers. So no need to join Twitter to view.
FBI Search and Seizure at Trump's Mar-A-Lago Residence, August 8, 2022, Case Dismissed July 15, 2024
This is correct. Alternatively, as already stated, you can click “Sign up” and then exit out of the sign-up popup screen.
However, I found that for me (using Firefox) I get the blocking sign-up screen only if I start scrolling down to later tweets, but I can view the ones at the top, like what JohnT linked to, and expand the screenshots there. This behaviour has been around for quite a while. I, too, have no interest in joining Twitter, and there are multiple ways around it.
Redacted affidavit to be released by noon (presumably ET) tomorrow.
Seems like an ill-advised move that was prompted by relentless pressure from the media. This cannot possibly help the investigation and could well jeopardize it, despite the redactions. And of course Trumpland will spin anything and everything they can in their favour.
I may have found the answer to my own question. According to this article in the National Review, Solomon may have released it to support the argument that Biden has been involved in the search and was lying when he said he wasn’t.
However, as I read the letter, and as the NR columnist reads it, Biden was involved in the issue of whether Trump could assert executive privilege with regard to the documents, and Biden said “no”. Aha! a Biden-lie!
However, unless I’ve missed something in a complicated story, Biden and Garland have been saying that Biden had no involvement in the search warrant and the decision to search Trump’s place. To my lawyerly mind, that’s a different issue from the executive privilege issue, so I’m not inclined to jump on the “Aha!” bandwagon just yet.
And, even though the columnist is writing for National Review, he’s very harsh on Trump, and in fact harsh on the FBI for not moving more quickly. Admits that a search warrant was likely reasonable, although perhaps not absolutely required.
For those of us who remain skeptical about whether the drastic measure of a search warrant was really necessary (especially given the FBI and DOJ’s evident lack of urgency in the months after Trump’s surrender of the 15 boxes in January 2022), these revelations require grappling with a hard question: Given that the former president was not responsibly securing the government’s most closely held intelligence, that he was trying to prevent the FBI from examining what he’d returned, that his lawyers were either misinformed about or lying about the classified information still retained at Mar-a-Lago, and that even the issuance of a grand-jury subpoena (with potential criminal penalties for noncompliance) had not succeeded in getting Trump to hand over the remaining classified information, what option short of a search warrant would have sufficed?
Meantime, some unsolicited advice to the former president and his apologists: If you are trying not to get indicted, the best defense is usually not a good offense. And it is never an offense that backfires.
I am so tempted to post Randy Rainbow’s Very Stable Genius video.
(He’s got quite a rhyme with gen-i-us!)
That’s not how I read the NR commentary. I read it as a rhetorical question that essentially says that given Trump’s deceptions and failure to cooperate, that seizure under a search warrant was the only option left for retrieving the classified documents.
The judge in charge is a former federal prosecutor. I am going to tentatively assume that he won’t force DOJ to release info that would tank the investigation.
We’ll see tomorrow.
I’m sure that’s true. I just don’t see what interests are served by releasing any part of the affidavit at all. ISTM the public interest is more than adequately served by all the information we already have about the raid and the details from the warrant itself. The only thing the affidavit will likely do is better prepare the Trump side against any charges that might be coming.
I expect that the affadavit will be something like.
The archives reported that the following items were retained by Trump. [ REDACTED], when we requested their return,they gave us some the documents but we found that [REDACTED] was still not accounted for. We further received information from [REDACTED] that the missing documents were still on the property. It is vital to national security that we act quickly to retrieve these documents because [REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED]
But won’t it release details on probable cause for the search warrant? That can’t be good for Donny and Co.
This is a very good thought and I would bet money that this is the case. It’s entirely plausible that they were all leftover documents from when Mar-a-lago was the “Southern White House” and that Trump Laziness was in fact the true reason for all this. He interacted with classified documents while at his private house as president, those documents were never stored properly or delivered to the archives as required, and now he’s up to his neck in shit over it.
This, among other things, is exactly why US Presidents live at the White House and don’t spend a significant portion of their time doing work elsewhere. Would you want to have highly classified documents in your personal residence where they can get misplaced or mishandled, and it’s your fault if they are?
The only part that doesn’t suit this pure laziness theory is everyone bent over backwards trying to help him fix this mess and he blew them all off. Laziness doesn’t explain that, he wanted them to keep their hands and eyes away from his stuff and thought he could get away with it.
So asked in General Questions here if the Secret Service could have been the ones that blew the whistle on the status of the classified documents at Mar-A-Largo as part of their job. The answer I got indicated to me that they would have been obligated to keep an eye on any criminal activity that their protectee (TFG) would have been doing and then hand it over to investigators when asked. To quote:
In the event of any other violation of law involving a protectee of the Secret Service for which the FBI has investigative jurisdiction:
2. The Secret Service during the immediate period following the violation will maintain and preserve any suspects, witnesses, and evidence under its control until such time as the FBI assumes its investigative responsibilities.
It just makes too much sense to me that government agents being in close proximity to you while you are illegally handling classified documents would be not only be allowed to testify about what they saw, but its their actual duty as government agents to do so. Its not like TFG didn’t know that he had agents around him all the time, yet he continued to commit crimes. That is beyond dumb.
Whether it helps or hurts Trump in the political and public relations battles is up for debate. But it certainly helps him in his legal battle by getting an advance peak at the details of the evidence against him.
As a complete aside, does “Truth” “Social” have the same character limit per post that Twitter does?
I also expect Trump to demand more details about the “whistleblower” and to make that a basis for complaint like he did with the Ukraine scandal.
Sure, so that a “2nd amendment solution” can be recommenced, or just harassment and death threats.
I’m betting this is close to the complete explanation. He wasn’t holding the documents to sell them off or use them as blackmail. He was simply holding them because he had them, and when he was officially asked to return them he went into “you can’t make me” mode.
Doesn’t change the fact that his acts of laziness and stubbornness were potential felonies, and possibly violations of the Espionage Act punishable by life in prison, or worse.
But that applies to virtually everything the Orange Peril does.
Yep. this is what I was saying upthread. The motive or reasoning or explanation is not important - he was caught with documents he was not allowed to have, and was evidently warned more than once to return them, and didn’t. I would like for it to be as “open-and-shut” as that, but of course nothing that good comes easy.