Unprecedented

The unprecedented raid on the former president of the United States is such a big news story, it’s totally eclipsing the promise of an additional army of 87,000 IRS agents—far more than necessary to audit every household making over $400,000. That’s a big and horrendous story. But this attack on President Trump is even more shocking. We talked about it here last week. But of course there’s more to learn about it every day.

the vague and general warrant, from here

 

Another Possible Motive

Attorney Robert Barnes has been giving his take on the Mar-a-Lago raid since that Monday afternoon, a week ago now. And as news comes out, he finds his take is still accurate. As he explains it, there are two basic narratives—on the Trump side; the FBI/DOJ side is something else altogether. These two narratives are trying to figure out what the FBI and DOJ are really up to. Barnes lays out the basic narrative first, and then his take:

The dominant narrative, this is an attempt by the Biden Justice Department to take Trump off of the 2024 election calendar by convicting him of a crime that removes—that has, as a consequence, the inability to hold federal office, and that it was based on Trump having documents he was not entitled to have, either because the archivist was entitled to them under the Presidential Records Act or that they were defense related documents and thus could not be in his private custody.

That’s basically the narrative we looked at here last Thursday. I should add that an additional scenario he doesn’t detail, and I don’t buy into either, is that they were fishing for incriminating evidence related to January 6^th. The reason they weren’t fishing for that is that they already know there isn’t any; Trump did not cause what happened at the capitol that day, nor was what happened an insurrection. But, as I said Thursday, their show inquiry is failing, so they’re moving on to the next attack.

Viva Frei (left) and Robert Barnes on their law vlog Sunday night livestream
screenshot from here

Here's Barnes’s take on their motive:

My theory was different. My theory was that this was a Deep State raid, that this was a raid not intended for the purposes of any kind of criminal prosecution or punishment, for the primary reason that the any criminal charge would require disclosure of what documents they were really, truly seeking…. Before Trump left, he asked all the agencies which documents they really wanted to keep classified. And there was speculation at the time that they basically gave him their Deep State, deep secret wish list to remain secret. And he declassified them but didn't publish them; he just took them with him. And that it would be potential insurance against indictment, insurance against assassination, insurance against other political threats that he knew he was going to be facing after leaving the presidency, particularly if he sought election again in 2024, and that they were paranoid about what was in those documents.

And so they were willing to risk the massive political blowback from an unprecedented raid of a former president and future presidential candidate’s personal residence for the purposes of getting those documents.

If I was right, what I predicted at the time was that when—this is before the warrant was released—that when the warrant is released, you'll find it to be very vague and very uncertain as to what exactly it’s seeking. It will be very elastic in what criminal statutes it claims there's probable cause of. That it will be notoriously overbroad in what it is seeking, and that they will be very bland and generic in their inventory. They won't list in detail what exactly they took, because they don't want anyone to know what exactly they were looking for. And that we would find out they would have kept the lawyers from overseeing it and anyone else in Trump world. They would ask cameras to be turned off, so nobody could know what it was they were actually seeking; that the goal wasn't to actually get these documents and restore them to their lawful owner, but to destroy them permanently and fully in the hopes that they were the only copies that existed.

It's not clear they have found such documents. They searched for a long time, you know, over 12 hours, then seized everything that was kind of there anyway. Apparently Trump had told them he kept the super secret documents in the safe. They had a safecracker there. They opened the safe, and the safe was empty, you know, Geraldo Rivera/Al Capone style.

Trump seemed unfazed and unbothered by what took place. That was outrageous and offensive, what took place. And he brought that to the court of public opinion. But he personally, by everybody who has talked to him since then, is not rattled and saw this coming at some level, understood the Deep State war that he's in the middle of—and has been ever since his candidacy rose to prominence in 2016.

In short, they are after evidence of Deep State wrongdoing—which is likely to begin to come out after the November midterm election, as soon as there is a shift in power in the House and hopefully the Senate. Such exposures will be easier and more complete with a return of Trump or a non-Deep-State Republican to the White House, but the threat to their power is much more immediate than keeping Trump from running in 2024.

What Barnes predicted turned out to be true: their warrant was vague and broad—which is not a legal warrant for a criminal investigation. Barnes lays out what we should have seen in a legal investigation, compared to what we saw:

The constitutional requirement is three-fold. There has to be probable cause of a crime for which there is specific evidence in the place that you're asking to be searched, and you can only request that which is evidence in support thereof. That's probable cause.

The second aspect is presentment, which means that when you get to the place you're going to search, you give the warrant to the person who you're—who has custody over the property, so that they can make sure you actually comply with what the warrant states and don't execute what's called a general warrant, which we'll get to in a minute.

Then the third aspect is particularity. This is the requirement that you specify individually which documents you're seeking and how probable cause exists both for the crime and for that document being evidence of the crime. Unlike civil discovery, which is under a general rule that if it could lead to discovery in America, you can request and get the information. That's not the case in a criminal search warrant context. You have to have particularity. You have to meet probable cause that both the crime exists and probable cause that the document you're asking to search and seize is evidence of that crime. What you cannot do is say, “I want to search your whole house and see if maybe there's some evidence of some kind of crime there.” That's what's not allowed.

That was the general warrants that the British were given prior to the American Revolution, which allowed the army basically to come in, and the colonial authorities, to come in and ransack your home—raid and ransack your home in search if maybe they’d find something. They could search anything, and they could seize anything, in the hopes that maybe it would be evidence of some sort of crime. That’s why we imposed the particularity, presentment, and probable cause preconditions for the execution of the search warrant.

Everything about this “criminal search warrant,” then, is bogus. Its vague and general, and the crimes they have hinted at are not possible crimes for the former president to have committed.

Other weird things about the warrant: they needed a separate, additional warrant to break into the safe, which they just happened to have a safecracker on hand to break into (it was empty). And the unprecedented gall of doing this at a former president’s residence is increased when you know that—it was supposedly urgent, but they waited three days before getting a judge to sign it—a judge who recused himself from a Trump case just six weeks ago, admitting he could not be unbiased. Hmm.

We learned today that they are fighting the request to publish what was in the affidavit requesting the search warrant—the statement of suspected crime and the reason the particular items to be searched would be evidence of such crime. However, such information might not be made public until there is an indictment. And in this case, since there is not likely to be an indictment, we may not get to see it for some time.

The reason there is not likely to be an indictment is that they do not want it known what they were searching for—which has nothing to do with any criminal lawbreaking of President Trump, because they know he didn’t do any.

One surprising thing Barnes said Sunday night was that he thought they didn’t think word would get out about the raid:

I don't think they thought this would ever become public knowledge. They went in with plainclothes. It did not leak at all until Trump himself told everybody about it. That means the Deep State didn't leak it in advance, like they do cases where they want the world to know about it.

They probably thought Trump would be too embarrassed by the fact of the raid to publicly disclose it, not understanding that Trump understands this game very well—or  well enough at this point. And so he was—Trump is the one saying, “These nuts are raiding my house; they're ransacking Melania's closet.”

Plainclothes or not, 30 FBI agents showing up anywhere is likely to raise attention. They’re doing something that egregious, and they think Trump will be embarrassed to let the world know? And yet, these are desperate times for the ones on the verge of losing their power.

  

They Can’t Be Trusted

On the Will Cain podcast today, about 20 minutes in, he talks why we should not believe the government in this case.  He says,

Will Cain on his August 15 podcast
screenshot from here

For 6 years Donald Trump has been the subject of an attack by many American people and many institutions, from the media to the national security state apparatus, who believe that he is illegitimate. That has been consistent. And that brings us to our final category: the credibility of these institutions. We’ve talked about this in the past. If there are many people that believe that Donald Trump is illegitimate, there are perhaps more who believe that the institutions of the United States are now illegitimate. And why would they believe that? Why would they have such little faith? Why would the believe the FBI, the DOJ, the media have no credibility? It might be because of this, over the past six years.

1.      The Russia collusion hoax.

2.      The Steele dossier hooker story.

3.      Russia paying bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan.

4.      Trump calling neo-Nazis, supposedly, “very fine people.”

5.      Trump suggesting drinking, injesting, injecting bleach to fight COVID.

6.      Trump overfed koi fish in Japan.

7.      Trump cleared protesters with teargas for a Bible photo op.

8.      Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

9.      Elections were fair, because no court found major fraud.

10.   January 6 was an insurrection to overthrow the government

11.   Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the Beast—he leaned over the Secret Service and grabbed the steering wheel of the Beast.

All of these stories are false. Cain points out that each one was debunked. (I had to look up the one about the koi fish; I hadn’t heard that one.) A lot of people still don’t know those are all lies. But a lot of us do. Cain adds, for those of us who recognize all these past lies, “We’re just going to jump on the bandwagon and believe that Donald Trump stole the nuclear codes?” I don’t think so.

By the way, nuclear codes are changed daily. Former President Trump doesn’t have them. I don’t know who’s making that up—the Washington Post story claimed it was about documents related to nuclear weapons—but there’s a scary pattern of these enemies of freedom doing whatever they’re accusing the other side of doing.

 

Attorney/Client Privilege

Over the weekend it came out that, among the documents seized by the FBI in last Monday’s raid were attorney/client privilege documents. That is, correspondence between Trump and his counsel, which the FBI had no business taking. They cannot use them against him, and they should not be able to view them; they are private. It’s a constitutional right.

What should happen isn’t what is happening. What should happen is that, as soon as it was noticed that the FBI had “accidentally” seized documents were attorney/client privilege documents, they should have arranged for them to be returned. That could have been done simply and directly by returning them. Or, to ensure security of the documents, they could have had a court-appointed person, called a special master.

But they did not do that. Instead they appointed a “filter team” of FBI agents going over the documents to decide which they should be reviewing and which they shouldn’t. Then they still wouldn’t return them; they’d send them on to a “tank team” of FBI agents, another level up, for review. It’s a fox guarding the henhouse scenario. As Jay Sekulow asks in his ACLJ broadcast, “Does anybody believe these are not being reviewed by the FBI?”

That’s multiple sets of eyes. They saw the documents when they were deciding what to box up and take from Mar-a-Lago. With anything but a general warrant, they would have recognized these as “do not take.” They had many hours at Mar-a-Lago to see them and make that decision; they took them. Then they went through them somewhere, enough to recognize they were attorney-client privilege documents, because they identified the boxes that contain them: A-13, A-14, A-26, A-33, A-43, and one labeled “set of documents.” Then there’s the “filter team,” followed by the “tank team”—all of these various FBI officials.

And remember, last Thursday DOJ Merrick Garland said it was wrong to question the FBI—which was something of a veiled threat toward anyone with common sense enough to question what this FBI is doing.

Law vlogger Robert Gouveia goes over the DOJ objection to 
warrant affidavit release, screenshot from here

We’ve never seen anything like this in America before—because the institutions that are clearly corrupt have never been this openly brazen before.

Again, I say they are desperate to maintain their power, at any cost, even at the cost of unveiling how corrupt they truly are. If they don’t succeed in maintaining their power in November, then it’s game over. So watch for more desperation in the next few months. It isn't going to be pretty. But it sure is unprecedented.