When someone first pointed that out I was gobsmacked. Now it seems like a possible situation given the appearance of a team from counterintelligence.
How absolutely horrifying!
FBI Search and Seizure at Trump's Mar-A-Lago Residence, August 8, 2022, Case Dismissed July 15, 2024
Would like to remind everyone that nobody knows what the search was about and all this… including me… is speculation.
However, Trump has an itemized list of items they were searching for and what laws he is suspected of breaking, hence my suggestion to just put him on Hannity and let him blather away.
“An itemized list of documents and suspected criminal behavior. At this time of day. In this part of the country. Localized entirely within Mar-a-lago.”
“Yes”
“May I see it?”
Um, no deal. If he reneges on seeking public office and/or shutting the hell up – and you know he will – he’ll be able to spin his subsequent arrest on espionage charges as political revenge.
If there’s strong evidence that he’s committed espionage, he should be charged and tried on that, period. If there’s less-than-slam-dunk evidence, then the deal should be not charging him with espionage in exchange for a guilty plea (and prison time) on seditious conspiracy, obstruction and whatever else they got. Not being executed can be a powerful motivator.
But it’s not sloppy, it’s the right move to gather any existing evidence using whatever means possible. It’s not a stretch to say Trump was known to have 15 boxes of classified material so there is reasonable suspicion he had more. I’m sure they could itemize the documents they retrieved and identify some that are known to be missing (probably because they were flushed down the toilet), and based on that would have no trouble getting a judge to sign a warrant to look for the missing documents.
There is a large excluded middle between “the DOJ has definitive intel on a smoking gun that will put Trump away” and “the DOJ is being reckless.”
In a single week, Biden took out the two greatest threats to America:
- The leader of Al Qeada
- The leader of the Republican Party
That actually sounds like a huge stretch to me.
My understanding is that anything found during the proper execution of a warrant can be used, even if it is not what the warrant was meant to look for.
Now, if the warrant says you are looking for a car, you can only look in places a car can be, so if you find something in the desk drawers, that wouldn’t be useable.
But they are looking for documents, and those can be pretty much anywhere.
In the safe was the gold crown he planned on placing on his own head. Donald the First, and hopefully last.
I will point out that lots of people have gotten in trouble for keeping documents that they really should have destroyed. Even intelligent people. They either don’t think they will ever be found or don’t realize their significance.
Committing espionage against the United States, as President of the country, is pretty well the definition of treason as defined in the Constitution.
Mueller referred something like 15 criminal matters to the DOJ and the people investigating all of this - Wray, etc. - were probably mostly appointed or promoted under Trump.
Merrick Garland certainly is to thank for some of the legal threats to Trump but, likely, at least 80% of it comes from Trump’s own hires and those hired/promoted by those hires.
Exactly. Which is why if there’s strong evidence Trump committed espionage, it shouldn’t be a bargaining chip to get him to go away. It should be used to make him go away – as in, forever.
FWIW, I kinda doubt Trump sold state secrets. Not because it’s beneath him, but because he’s too stupid to have kept it hidden this long.
You think the same country that refused to prosecute Jefferson Davis, the clearest traitor in the history of traitors, is gonna go after Trump with those kinds of charges? Even if only to threaten him into taking a plea deal? Please.
Definitely not. Having him off site will make it much more difficult for him to interfere with the search or hide/destroy documents.
I’d like someone to answer a question I posed earlier:
Would we even know the search was happening/had happened if trump himself hadn’t announced it to the world?
FWIW, I head someone on NPR this morning noting that DOJ has a policy of not taking substantial actions (my words) less than 30 days prior elections and they wanted to get this done before it got too close and avoid the appearance of politics playing a role.
AIUI, the rule is a little more detailed than that. They won’t take substantial actions less than 30 days prior to an election in which the target subject is participating. Trump is not running for anything in the 2022 election, so the rule doesn’t apply in any way.
One thing that everyone should be careful of is thinking that when you see “a person with knowledge of the situation says that they were looking for documents related to the National Archives requests”, that the person with knowledge must be an FBI officer or some random third party. The real answer is quite likely to have a last name starting with T.
The only people to see the warrant are the DOJ and the Trump family and the Trump family are not above turning themselves in to the media, to try and get ahead of the story. People mostly only read the initial headlines and not the follow-up so when it turns out that the warrant also included a hunt for bribery, treason, child porn, etc. that all - from the standpoint of the Trumps - hopefully comes in when people have lost interest in the FBI raid story, and no one checks it out.
I would suggest against being too confident that the raid was about the Archives papers. I wouldn’t be surprised that it was in there but, if it was, it would have almost certainly been the least damning charge and the one that you could most easily argue is unfair and evidence of politicized use of the FBI - you know, the one charge that Trump would prefer people to be thinking about.
I heard someone last night say that news organizations were trying to confirm the search when Trump did it for them. So, I guess they had some information, but not enough to broadcast. I think the story would have come out within a few hours somehow.