FBI search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago (Update: Trump Indicted!)

[Torie]

Nine pages of argument and shoving and pushing when, other than the words "classified documents," nobody has the slightest idea what is going on, not even a leak or two. Congratulations to all of you for post padding, including myself now I guess.

[Torie]

OK, here is some real beef in my book rather than padding. Andy writes for a conservative albeit Trump skeptical rag, but he is a very smart lawyer with common sense who is most definitely not a hack, or to put it another way, his take and mine on matters largely coincide.

Yes, the pay wall shuts me out too, but I suspect his thesis, is that yeah, nobody would be such a drama queen over where a bunch of boring paper that nobody will ever read is stored, and so thus the game being hunted is much more significant. It seems to me the idea is to find out what Trump and the hard core kooks were talking about when, you know, like Steve Bannon.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/the-fbis-mar-a-lago-raid-its-about-the-capitol-riot-not-the-mishandling-of-classified-information/?utm_source=onesignal&utm_medium=push&utm_campaign=article

[Torie]

https://twitter.com/mirandadevine/status/1556977120597135360
Not only is the Director of the FBI a Republican, the warrant was signed off on by a Trump appointee!

Magistrates I think are appointed by their federal district court judge bosses. The article that I read is that he was appointed out of 64 who applied. Following the tweet I found this one. Sad.

https://twitter.com/RonDeSantisFL/status/1556803433939755010

[Torie]

The warrant isn't going to tell us anything we don't already know from reporting.

There's nothing that would convince his supporters anyway. There is just no scenario possible for them that makes the cult leader look bad. He's always right.

The warrant may have an attachment that lists the Trump crimes for which the DOJ asserts that it has probable cause supporting the search warrant. What I read is that such an attachment is common, but not a prerequisite to a search warrant. If there is such at attachment, I doubt that Trump will be releasing the warrant. Without that attachment, the warrant will just have a general statement of the type of documents covered, and would not be very revealing. The affidavit in support of the warrant application prepared by the DOJ stating the evidence constituting probable cause that the judge reviewed would not be given to Trump unless indicted, and absent an indictment would not become a public document ever.

So Trump may be unleashed and free to feed the beast for a considerable period, on past the election, without abatement. There must be something that the DOJ was concerned that Trump would destroy or secret, and/or it is quite confident that there will be an indictment for something. Otherwise, this will not go well for the DOJ, while Trump gets a much needed blood transfusion to fuel his predations.

[Torie]

The warrant isn't going to tell us anything we don't already know from reporting.

Not true.  It would list the statutes under which the FBI demonstrated probable cause to the judge, i.e. it would tell us what crimes were being investigated.

Maybe, maybe not.

[Torie]

Below is the link to the video I watched which explains the different pieces of paper involved with a search warrant, from the affidavit in support of the warrant that is under seal unless there is an indictment that tells the whole story that Trump does not have, the warrant itself that Trump does have that is quite bare bones, often no more than a page, which sometimes has, and sometimes does not not have,  an attachment listing the potential crimes involved, and the return, which lists what is taken, i.e. 12 boxes of documents, which is also bare bones.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/08/10/mar-a-lago-trump-fbi-search-unknowns-honig-newday-vpx.cnn

In short, the concept that the contents of the warrant itself if revealed would burn the barn down, is not well taken. I tend to doubt however that the MSM will stop feeding the beast.

One can speculate as to whether there is a list of crimes in play attachment, and why, or why not, the DOJ would want to attach it, and that might be fun, but I doubt the MSM is up to doing that task very well either.

That said, team Trump should be asked and asked again, if the warrant has an attachment listing a set of crimes. The rest is a dry hole.

[Torie]

Trump could release the warrant publically.

Trump will never release the warrant. He's going to play this up as a witchhunt of epic proportions and claim that the Republican appointed FBI direction is somehow in cohorts with the Biden Administration to take him down before the election.

Releasing the warrant that likely contains information about the potential crimes he is being investigated for would squash that narrative.

If/when the warrant is released, Trump will claim it's fake and it's not what he was served, which he'll never release and people will believe him.

Will it ever been made public if Trump doesn’t release it himself?

If there is an indictment based on evidence discovered in the search, I believe the warrant and supporting docs would be filed with the indictment (but IANAL).

Yes, I think so, and in particular the affidavit in support of the warrant that is otherwise under seal, because at that point the defense might want to move to quash the warrant as not having met the legal requirements to have been issued in the first instance,, in which event all the evidence obtained via  the warrant is tossed.

I suppose that it might be possible to move to unseal the affidavit without an indictment, but that is beyond my pay grade.

[Torie]

The schadenfreude just oozes out of this video ad consuming all before it.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1557172686358335489

[Torie]

Rand there is a concept out there called "chain of custody."  You might look it up.

[Torie]

This is why we need immediate oversight and answers from the Justice Department on why the raid was conducted.  The DOJ seems to be downplaying the raid, which is not a very smart political calculation.   

Well they're not supposed to be political.

Merrick Garland is a political appointee.  Any raid/investigation into a former president is going to attract major political attention, so he should have been out in front of this with a major press conference the day after the raid was conducted.  Staying silent makes it seem like they're hiding something. 

Not staying silent absent public safety concerns violates DOJ policy.

https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-1-7000-media-relations

So it's going to take the slings and arrows. My guess however is that Garland is pretty confident that an indictment for something is in the offing. Otherwise, this is grist for Trump world's  mill.

[Torie]

If Trump was mishandling classified information, then yes, the FBI should go retrieve that information.

If Trump was in possession of classified information, there's no reason that couldn't have been resolved cooperatively (or at most with a subpoena.)  Trump voluntarily surrended 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives back in January.  

Sure. No one knows yet what the warrant was for, but I highly doubt the FBI raids a former president's house if there was not something serious to it. I do not believe the conspiracies that somehow Biden is pushing the FBI to take out Trump before the next election. Biden probably wants to run against Trump again.

This is why we need immediate oversight and answers from the Justice Department on why the raid was conducted.  The DOJ seems to be downplaying the raid, which is not a very smart political calculation.    

Why can't Trump just tell us?

Tell us what?  That the FBI is on a fishing expedition and showed up to Mar-a-Lago to collect every piece of paper they could get their hands on?  He's already said that

He has a copy of the warrant and can release it.

As multiple posters have already said, it's unlikely the warrant contains any information as to why the search was conducted.

Georgia "the nice mod" Moderate, provided a link to an article that tells you all you need to know and more. I copied and pasted it below for your convenience. If true, it was the antithesis of a fishing expedition. That of course brings up the question of just why Trump was so intent on keeping records that it was a felony for him to keep. Feel free to speculate away on that one.

https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-informer-told-fbi-what-docs-trump-was-hiding-where-1732283

[Torie]

I mean, this is all moot point anyway.

It could come out that Trump did indeed break the law by keeping and concealing classified documents that he was not supposed to have and I'm sure Republicans will continue to have some type of excuse for how it's not a big deal.

That is precisely the problem, the Republican fury over this is a distraction. It is blatantly apparent that they will not allow Trump to be held to any standard of accountability under any circumstances, even if he was legitimately guilty of crimes. Their partisan identity won't allow for it, and it provides an opening for the codification of blatantly lawless behavior to become protected by whichever individual takes on the mantle of their partisan figurehead.

This is the real problem we are dealing with here. Law enforcement agencies have long abused their powers in this country, I'm not going to shed extra special tears even if they were guilty of doing so in this instance just because they're investigating a politically powerful person. And I also couldn't care less if the FBI got its teeth kicked in for misconduct if it could be proven that they did so in this instance. What I do care about is that the Republican Party will respond the same way to any organization or individual that attempts to hold whoever their cult figurehead happens to be within the bounds of the law.

Elevating a malignant narcissist to the leadership of your party in a system as polarized and partisan as ours has terribly corrosive effects to the psychology and behavior of the collective.

Yep, this 100% exactly. The most egregious part about this whole thing is that the GOP response is that there's simply no way that Trump could've done something wrong - and then even if he did, then it's still not a big deal! There will never be any type of accountability and they'll bend themselves into a pretzel somehow defending or reasoning whatever the outcome is.

You do know that even if convicted, Trump can not only run for POTUS, he can serve as POTUS, and do it all from a jail cell, right? And after he pardons himself, is SCOTUS on an issue as to which there is some ambiguity, really going to rule Trump lacks such power, and preclude him from moving back into his old digs?

[Torie]

If Trump was mishandling classified information, then yes, the FBI should go retrieve that information.

If Trump was in possession of classified information, there's no reason that couldn't have been resolved cooperatively (or at most with a subpoena.)  Trump voluntarily surrended 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives back in January. 

Sure. No one knows yet what the warrant was for, but I highly doubt the FBI raids a former president's house if there was not something serious to it. I do not believe the conspiracies that somehow Biden is pushing the FBI to take out Trump before the next election. Biden probably wants to run against Trump again.

This is why we need immediate oversight and answers from the Justice Department on why the raid was conducted.  The DOJ seems to be downplaying the raid, which is not a very smart political calculation.   

Why can't Trump just tell us?

Tell us what?  That the FBI is on a fishing expedition and showed up to Mar-a-Lago to collect every piece of paper they could get their hands on?  He's already said that

He has a copy of the warrant and can release it.

As multiple posters have already said, it's unlikely the warrant contains any information as to why the search was conducted.

Georgia "the nice mod" Moderate, provided a link to an article that tells you all you need to know and more. I copied and pasted it below for your convenience. If true, it was the antithesis of a fishing expedition. That of course brings up the question of just why Trump was so intent on keeping records that it was a felony for him to keep. Feel free to speculate away on that one.

https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-informer-told-fbi-what-docs-trump-was-hiding-where-1732283

This reporting does not indicate that Trump was, as you say, "intent" on keeping classified information at Mar-A-Lago.  Quite the opposite, actually!  He had already voluntarily returned 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives in January.  If the FBI had reason to suspect that there were additional documents at Mar-a-Lago that still needed to be surrendered, it is not apparent why they needed to be seized in a raid instead of collected cooperatively (as before) or through the use of a subpoena. 

He returned some stuff while withholding other stuff, stuff that was keep it in a safe worthy. That suggests intent. While you might trust Trump not to deep six records subject to a subpoena, I am not, and I guess neither Garland nor the judge were either.

I do wonder how the FBI opened the safe.

[Torie]

I stumbled across this in an NYT article that just came across the transom:

"Some senior Republicans have been warned by allies of Mr. Trump not to continue to be aggressive in criticizing the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the matter because it is possible that more damaging information related to the search will become public."

Are these false flag allies, or bailing ship allies, or what?

[Torie]

1. The warrant is unlikely to have much in it of interest, e.g. it won't have the words "nuclear documents" in it. It most likely will have just a general statement that its scope is documents that by law Trump should not have. It might have an attachment stating the potential crime involved, but that might merely reference the statute regarding the improper handling of government documents that became a felony in 2018 in a statute Trump demanded and signed per trying to nail Hillary. Be careful what you wish for.

2. What is not being released, and what Garland did not move to unseal, and what Trump may well now be demanding be unsealed (but won't be by the judge absent DOJ consent), is the affidavit in support of the issuance of the warrant, which would entail the DOJ dropping its pants as it were as to what they have on Trump and where they are going with it.

3. So assuming the words "nuclear documents" is not in the warrant, who leaked those words to WAPO, which would be highly improper?

4. WTF are "nuclear documents" anyway, as someone queried above? Blueprints? What? And such documents were just lying around the oval office for Trump to put in his briefcase as he left? And yes, presumably the DOJ found out about them recently, because if so sensitive they would not have dicked around for months with chit chat and subpoenas and so forth, and of course given that they were on site before, would have picked them up then.

I just cannot conceive what kind of documents these are that would cause such a fuss. If hyper technical keys to the kingdom, POTUS would not have had those documents, and would not have been able to understand what was in them even if he had possession of them. It would be like me having a notebook full of software code. Wut?

Addendum: I forgot about the inventory list that will be revealed, and the NYT's leak source refers to "special access programs." I wonder if Trump knew what he had in his safe. Hopefully not. If he did, he might have already shared it with all the wrong people. I hope that I am being excessively paranoid here.

"But the person briefed on the matter said investigators had been concerned about material from what the government calls “special access programs,” a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities."

"While the inventory provided to Mr. Trump’s team after the search is unlikely to reveal details about the specific documents he kept, it refers to an array of sensitive material, according to a person with knowledge of the matter."

[Torie]

If you want to die quickly, take a drink every time a Republican deflects to Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden.

I just referred to Hillary Clinton in the post immediately above, so I beat the Pubs to the punch and I win. So much winning ...

[Torie]

More from the NYT: The inventory list is going to be redacted it appears. The affidavit will probably never be released. So something is out there that really got the DOJ and the spooks "spooked."

"But the motion filed by Mr. Garland’s lead lawyer in the matter, Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, indicates the document might have significant redactions.

'Much will depend on how specific the inventory was: such inventories can be relatively sparse, detailing the part of the federal code potentially violated, or can be more detailed descriptions of the materials retrieved, according to former department officials.

'The most informative and sensitive document, an affidavit detailing the “probable cause” evidence that prompted Judge Reinhart to approve the search, will not be released now, or probably ever, department officials said on Thursday."

[Torie]

Both George Will and David Brooks have columns out which can be read as anti-DOJ which is a good sense of where Never Trumpers fall on this issue. Their instinct is to circle the wagons and attack the messenger.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opinion/fbi-trump-mar-a-lago-raid.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/11/merrick-garland-explain-mar-a-lago-search/

The above are the links to the two opinion pieces. Both are behind paywalls, and I only pay for the NYT. Brooks is most definitely not in the tank for Trump. He is just worried that it will reanimate Trump. George Will I cannot access behind the WAPO paywall,  but he says in his headline that Garland needs to show his hand.

Both articles are from yesterday and thus stale, since Garland did his thing (so check Will off the list), and we know that highly sensitive documents were in play threatening the national security. Presumably a further explanation will be made as to why the documents were not turned over pursuant to the subpoena and what led the DOJ to believe that Trump was stonewalling, and thus the need for surprise ala a search warrant.

If after all of that, Trump is in fact reanimated, then the point is not that Brooks is an enabler, it is that the half the American electorate is one sick puppy, which is Brooks’s point.

[Torie]

Anyone else uncomfortable with his thinly-veiled racism and Islamophobia?

What?

You think Trump using Obama's middle name was for some benign reason?

[Torie]

Both George Will and David Brooks have columns out which can be read as anti-DOJ which is a good sense of where Never Trumpers fall on this issue. Their instinct is to circle the wagons and attack the messenger.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opinion/fbi-trump-mar-a-lago-raid.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/11/merrick-garland-explain-mar-a-lago-search/

The above are the links to the two opinion pieces. Both are behind paywalls, and I only pay for the NYT. Brooks is most definitely not in the tank for Trump. He is just worried that it will reanimate Trump. George Will I cannot access behind the WAPO paywall,  but he says in his headline that Garland needs to show his hand.

Both articles are from yesterday and thus stale, since Garland did his thing (so check Will off the list), and we know that highly sensitive documents were in play threatening the national security. Presumably a further explanation will be made as to why the documents were not turned over pursuant to the subpoena and what led the DOJ to believe that Trump was stonewalling, and thus the need for surprise ala a search warrant.

If after all of that, Trump is in fact reanimated, then the point is not that Brooks is an enabler, it is that the half the American electorate is one sick puppy, which is Brooks’s point.

I see people on here saying that Trump 2024 wouldn't even get 40 million votes...when the guy just lost with 74 million a year and a half ago.

The amount of delusion is insane.

You now with a grand total of one score and 11 posts have managed to use about half of that count to make the same concern trolling point over and over and over again, that the warrant is going to cause a red wave to sweep the land and Trump to reclaim his kingdom. If Trump has documents that imperil national security, and put lives at risk, that it is a felony for him to have, I want the FBI to confiscate them, ASAP, and if the consequence of that is that Trump gets 500 million votes, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. Just put me at the top of your insanely delusional box, and triage me out of your life. There is no need to punish yourself in that way. Thank you.

[Torie]

https://twitter.com/sgurman/status/1558140291449765888?s=21&t=8CjPqO959CaH2s...

The article is paywalled, but the first paragraph is visible and says:

FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

One can listen to more than one can read. The scope of the warrant was to search just about everywhere in the puzzle palace, that docs at various levels of classification were seized (the levels having bureaucratic jargon monikers), and that while Trump world claims that everything he has he declassified, there is a process to doing that, and it is not just a matter of Trump claiming he mentally declassified everything one minute before Biden took office.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fbi-recovered-eleven-sets-of-classified-documents-in-trump-search-inventory-shows-11660324501


Oh, I see you found a tweet from someone who listened, and you seem familiar with the moniker jargon. You must have worked for the CIA or something. 

[Torie]

The archives pushes back against Trump.

Trump's act here reminds me of Churchill said about the Russians wandering down the hotel hallway turning all the door knobs to the rooms in search of doors that are unlocked. Alas the Barack Hussein Obama door was locked. Whose door is next?

[Torie]

Bretibart and WSJ got the warrent at the same time.

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1558155382945619971?s=20&t=tarkDRpDqNK1...

Which suggests they were leaked by Trump insiders.  Why...?

I would assume that Trump world gave the warrant and inventory return document to the WSJ (which had just published a Trump friendly editorial on this issue), and Bretibart as press friendlies, to give them a head start over those evil twins, the NYT and WAPO. Breitbart does not know that the 14 days to execute a warrant is standard, and tries to ascribe sinister motives to that, and also that Garland's waiting three days to execute (as if Trump world was aware that the judge had signed the warrant), impeaches the notion that the documents were sensitive, rather than making sure that all the ducks were in a row and properly coreographed, before the swoop down. Bretibart when it comes to hiring attack dogs, does not hire the best. Instead of  pit bulls, it hires cocker spaniels that get lost on the way to their food bowls. Sad.

[Torie]

Tuned into Fox. They're basically going with he thought he declassified the stuff and if it was such a big deal it would have been retrieved a lot sooner.

Including, inter alia, e.g., documents that list all of the CIA moles in the Kremlin? If there really are hyper sensitive documents like that, Trump claiming that he declassified them all, so that he can tweet them out at his leisure, is not going to be credible, or be very flattering to him, or something.

[Torie]

Politico now has the warrant.

Politico reads almost as if it were the NYT on this one.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/12/gop-contorts-itself-in-defense-of-trump-as-new-fbi-search-details-emerge-00051418