I’ll say it again, this raid on Trump’s home was not about what they had on him, but rather what he had on them.
Over at Legal Insurrection Bill Jacobson has a few observations about the latest non-informational drop from the DOJ:
Despite the media frothing à la Russia Collusion, the filing did not reveal a lot new. We already knew from court filings and FBI/DOJ leaks to the media that Trump had documents marked with varying levels of classification at Mar-a-Lago. The legal issue is whether it was a crime for Trump to have those documents.
In my opinion, no. The fact of the matter is those documents were declassified, as a standing order from the commander-in-chief.
I’ll say it again, this raid on Trump’s home was not about what they had on him, but rather what he had on them.
The DOJ filing hints that what they will argue in a potential criminal process is obstruction of justice. But that’s a typical ploy by the feds — if they can’t get you for a crime, they get you for lying about the non-crime. The argument is that team Trump lied when they said all subpoenaed documents had been returned. If that’s all they have, are they really going to indict the former president and future candidate over lying about a non-crime?
But the most inflammatory part of the filing was the wholly unnecessary inclusion of a photograph of envelopes marked with various classifications that was included as an exhibit.
What was the purpose of including the photo? That such documents were found at Mar-a-Lago was already known. We also don’t know what they are about, are they the Crossfire Hurricane documents Trump expressly declassified? We don’t know.
We may not have proof positive that it was crossfire hurricane documents, but that does seem the most likely scenario.
I’ll say it again, this raid on Trump’s home was not about what they had on him, but rather what he had on them.
If this is a staged photo it may have given the feds a minor news cycle win, but it didn’t help FBI/DOJ credibility. It makes them seem like they are playing to the media, but in fact they played into Trump’s argument that the FBI/DOJ can’t be trusted.”
Well again, there’s nothing new here. We are already knew we couldn’t trust them. And as if on cue in support of that lack of trustworthiness, Merrick Garland comes out with a statement to doj employees that talking to Congress without authorization will be dealt with.
This is an obvious attempt to squash whistleblowers. The American people are coming close to learning the truth about what the doj and the FBI have been doing for the last decade or so, and Garland is getting nervous about it.
I’ll say it again, this raid on Trump’s home was not about what they had on him, but rather what he had on them.
And let’s be clear about the documents that are supposedly hidden or moved as claimed by the DOJ:
The documents were found in Trump’s desk. If you were going to hide documents, would you leave them in your primary work area? Did the department of Justice figure that he was going to do his research in the storage area?
I’ll say it again, this raid on Trump’s home was not about what they had on him, but rather what he had on them.
But now suddenly, we find that Joe Biden had classified documents that he shouldn’t have had it all back when he was vice president. And they turned up at his Chinese paid for think tank in delaware. What could possibly go wrong here?
And of course the FBI didn’t get involved with that situation. Nor did the doj, at least that they’ll admit to. The answer as to why seems uniquely obvious.