August 17, 2022
There are many unanswered questions surrounding the shocking FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s residence in Florida- Mar-a-Lago. However, one thing is clear, this unprecedented action on a former and possibly future president’s home was not about the mishandling of classified information or national security concerns.
Timeline Leading Up To Raid
By all accounts, Trump and his attorneys had been communicating and cooperating with federal authorities since early this year. Following discussions between Trump’s representatives and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Trump handed over 15 boxes of documents back in January.
In February, David Ferriero, head of the National Archives, alerted the Department of Justice that he found “classified national security information” in the boxes received from Mar-a-Lago.
June 3rd, under a grand-jury subpoena, Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago. Trump offered no resistance to the order. He and his representatives opened Mar-a Lago to the government officials and gave them free access to search through the stored boxes. If there were documents of national concern, it strains credulity why they did not take them at this time.
Shortly after the June 3rd meeting, a DOJ official emailed a request that the Mar-a-Lago storage room, which contained the documents, be better secured. The following day Trump associates placed a more substantial lock on the door.
On June 22 the Trump Organization received a subpoena for surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago. Immediately, they handed over the requested footage.
As confirmed by Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, there was no more contact until Monday, August 8th, when 30 FBI agents descended unannounced upon Mar-a-Lago at 6:30 am demanding entry.
By all accounts, Trump and his associates cooperated with every request made by the DOJ. If the FBI’s objective was to find documents belonging in the archives, the DOJ could have issued another subpoena, specifically requesting those documents.
Instead, they chose Defcon 5 and raided the home of the 45th president of the United States. An action never before taken in other known instances of mishandling of classified information and certainly never taken against a former US president.
Search Warrant
Friday’s release of the search warrant provided no clarity to the most pressing question- why was the matter considered such a national security concern requiring an unprecedented search of a former president’s home?
If the matter was so urgent why did they wait three days from when a judge approved the warrant to conduct the raid? Not to mention Trump has been out of office for 18 months, so whatever documents he may have, have been in his possession for at least that long. Why is it now an urgent matter? Further as reported by the Wall Street Journal, AG Garland deliberated for weeks before signing off on the warrant. The timeline belies the claims of urgency.
AG Garland’s assurance last Thursday that it is FBI “standard practice” “to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken” is laughable.
The warrant to raid Trump’s home allowed agents to take “any government and /or presidential record created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”. In other words, every single document produced during Trump’s presidency. Further, if even one document contained in the box was marked classified, the agents were allowed to take the whole box plus the adjacent boxes.
The Federal Bureaucracy and Trump
What could account for such aggressive tactics antithetical to the 4th amendment? Is it just coincidental that the known players involved with the raid appear to be on the political left?
Archivist David Ferriero, an Obama appointee who raised the concern about Trump possessing classified documents to the DOJ, interestingly never made a referral to the DOJ over the deletion of Hillary Clinton’s emails from her illegal unsecured server when she was Secretary of State.
It is not a stretch to assume Ferriero is a Democrat and not a fan of Trump.
Ferriero is as “woke” as they come. Under his direction, NARA established a task force to identify racial inequality. Based on the task force’s recommendations NARA put warning labels on many of our nation’s founding documents, such as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Incredibly the task force also concluded that the national Archives’ rotunda needed to be “reimagined” because it is an example of “structural racism”.
Ferriero also recently retired because he wanted President Biden to choose his successor. During a recent public symposium, Ferriero warned Biden: “Better not hire another white male.”
Perplexingly, even though he was not in the Capitol on January 6th, Ferriero claims it was “the worst day of my life.”
The social media postings of the judge who signed off on the warrant to raid Trump’s home, David Reinhart, indicate he too worships at the woke altar and does not hold a favorable opinion of Trump. In a 2017 Facebook post, Reinhart blasted Trump for comments he made about Congressman John Lewis. Reinhart wrote- “John Lewis the conscience of America. Donald Trump doesn’t have the moral stature to kiss John Lewis’ feet.”
Reinhart has also donated to the campaigns of Barack Obama and Jeb Bush and shared a video from a page called “WokeFolks”. The video attempts to demonstrate “white privilege”.
Interestingly, just six weeks ago, Reinhart recused himself from a lawsuit brought by Trump against Hillary Clinton over impartiality concerns. Therefore, by his admission, he held a bias against Trump just before he signed the warrant to raid Trump’s home.
The powers within the federal bureaucracy have wanted to politically annihilate the outsider, Donald Trump, from the moment he announced his candidacy in 2015. It was rich that in defense of the warrant Garland claimed that the DOJ applies the “law evenly without fear or favor”. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially concerning Trump.
Undeniably, those in charge of Obama-Biden’s DOJ/FBI weaponized their agencies against then-candidate and President Trump. Recall the FBI opened an investigation dubbed Crossfire Hurricane into Trump under the phony pretext of Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential campaign, which lasted into his presidency.
Let’s not forget who ran Crossfire Hurricane- the infamous Peter Strzok who promised his FBI colleague and girlfriend, Lisa Page, that “we’ll stop” Trump from ever becoming president.
During the course of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI spied on numerous members of Trump’s campaign with confidential human informants and even surveilled the electronic communications of Trump aide Carter Page. To obtain the warrants to spy on Page the FBI used the unverified (and now debunked) dossier commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign as evidence to the FISA court.
Incredibly, FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith plead guilty to doctoring evidence on the Page FISA application for the warrant. Clinesmith’s punishment- probation. That’s it. He did not even lose his license to practice law.
Thanks to the FBI’s Russian collusion witch-hunt and the Robert Mueller special counsel probe which followed, almost the entirety of Trump’s presidency was under a cloud of suspicion that he was a Russian asset.
The forces within the federal government threw everything at Trump possible to prevent and then end his presidency. Non-stop politically motivated investigations, bogus accusations of Russian collusion, constant leaks to the media, impeachment, one-sided January 6th hearings, and he is still standing.
To the dismay of those on the left Donald Trump still wields tremendous power. Almost all of those he endorsed in the primaries have won their elections. Moreover, all polling indicates that the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election is his if he chooses to run. Short of making an announcement, Trump has given every indication he plans to run again for president.
The unprecedented Gestapo-style raid was an extension of what the FBI started seven years ago- a mission to politically destroy Trump.
The FBI did not raid the former president’s home looking for sensitive documents that belonged in the archives, they were on a fishing expedition searching for anything to block Trump’s 2024 run for the White House.
However, it looks like their plan is backfiring. A Trafalgar Group poll found that 83.3% of Republican voters say the FBI raid has increased their motivation to vote in the 2022 midterm elections. Barring a bombshell revelation from the DOJ, Trump’s odds of taking back the presidency have significantly increased.
