'Under siege': Trump says FBI raided Mar-a-Lago

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'Under siege': Trump says FBI raided Mar-a-Lago
Christopher Wilson

Mon, August 8, 2022 at 7:27 PM

Former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. (Joe Raedle/Getty Image
Former President Donald Trump said Monday evening that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had conducted a raid of his Florida home.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a statement posted to Truth Social, his social media website, calling it “prosecutorial misconduct” and an attempt by Democrats to hurt a possible 2024 presidential bid.

The Justice Department is investigating Trump’s actions in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The then president’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election have also been the focus of the House Jan. 6 select committee’s investigation. In May, a federal grand jury also began investigating whether Trump had mishandled classified documents, including taking 15 boxes of materials to the Florida resort.

Former U.S. Attorney and NBC legal analyst Barb McQuade noted that the FBI would have needed for a judge to agree that there was probable cause in order for a search warrant to have been approved.


The New York Times reported Monday evening that two people familiar with the investigation said it appeared to be centered on material Trump brought with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago after he left office.

Trump's handling of records that are subject to protection under the Presidential Records Act was under scrutiny throughout the day Monday after New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman released photos that that appeared to show that Trump tried to dispose of documents by ripping them up and placing them in toilets.

Regarding the FBI search warrant executed Monday at Mar-a-Lago, the White House issued a statement to NBC News saying, “We did not have notice of the reported action and would refer you to the Justice Department for any additional information."

Monday’s raid was first reported by Florida Politics — which said the FBI had executed a search warrant and left the premises — minutes before Trump posted his statement about it.

“They even broke into my safe!” Trump said in the statement, comparing the latest events to the Watergate break-in. Trump also lamented that his former opponent in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton, “was allowed to delete and acid wash 33,000 E-mails AFTER they were subpoenaed by Congress.” An FBI investigation into Clinton’s handling of the emails recommended that the former secretary of state not be charged with a crime, and an internal State Department investigation cleared her of wrongdoing.

Trump concluded by writing, “I will continue to fight for the Great American People!”

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“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a statement posted to Truth Social, his social media website

So in other words no one saw it....

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The Mar-a-Lago Raid Proves the U.S. Isn’t a Banana Republic (well... not yet anyway)

theatlantic.com
The Mar-a-Lago Raid Proves the U.S. Isn’t a Banana Republic
David A. Graham
August 8, 2022, 9:46 PM ET

About the author: David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Donald Trump would have you believe that Monday’s surprise FBI raid on his Florida estate was, like so many things he disdains, un-American.

Not much is known about the operation as of this writing. The FBI has not commented, and much of what is public comes from a statement by Trump, a notoriously unreliable source of information. Trump wrote, “My beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” who he said arrived unannounced and broke into a safe.

Reporting from The Washington Post and The New York Times indicates that the raid appears to be connected to Trump’s removal of records from the White House at the end of his administration, in what critics have said was a clear violation of federal public-records law.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” Trump wrote. “Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”

Trump is right that nothing like this has ever happened to a former president of the United States before—he always omits the former, a way of refusing to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election—but he’s wrong about what it means about the rule of law in the United States.

Trump was always more banana republican than Reagan or Lincoln Republican. Unlike his presidential predecessors, and despite his open disdain for Latin America and Latin Americans, he often styled himself as a sort of caudillo, trying to rule with an iron fist, circumvent the Constitution and legislature, enlist the military into his schemes, and use the power of the state to further his own electoral and personal fortunes. Just today, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker reported on how Trump pushed the military to conduct the sort of garish parades that, as one general put it, characterize foreign dictatorships, and complained that U.S. generals were not as loyal to him as Hitler’s top brass was to the führer. And at the end of his term, Trump retired to a palatial estate fringed by palm trees to plot his next moves.

In a real banana republic, he might have hoped to live with impunity—as long as he could outwit his political opponents’ schemes. Instead, Trump has found himself beset on many sides. He was impeached, a second time, after leaving office; a district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, continues to investigate his meddling in vote-counting after the election; the New York attorney general is investigating his company, and will soon depose him; and a House committee is probing his attempt to overturn the election and pressuring the Justice Department to bring charges against him related to that. (The DOJ has refused to comment on any related investigations.)

Trump is not the victim of political persecution. A bedrock principle of American law is that no one—not even the president, much less the former president—is above the law, and if they commit crimes, they must answer for them. “What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee?” Trump asked in his statement. But this question is simple enough that any AP U.S. History student could easily manage it: Watergate was an illegal break-in conducted by a team of political operatives, not law-enforcement agents with judicially approved warrants, working for an FBI director appointed by Trump.

For all Trump’s bluster, he hasn’t been charged with any crimes. If he is, he will have every opportunity to defend himself in court. (Contrast that with his own disdain for due process for other people accused of crimes.) Some legal scholars are nervous about the precedent set by potentially prosecuting a former president. But the precedent set by giving him a free pass by virtue of his electoral history would be even more troubling.

The raid seemed to come out of nowhere, a sign that the federal government is handling this investigation—whatever it is—with great secrecy and delicacy. In the coming days, the public is likely to learn more, including whether White House documents are really the sole or main factor behind the “siege” of Mar-a-Lago.

Even though Trump’s rise to the White House in 2016 owed much to “her emails”—Hillary Clinton’s sloppy handling of classified records—his administration was particularly brazen about not maintaining records from the start. Trump ripped up documents at will, leaving teams to comb through the scraps and literally tape them together. On Monday, Axios published photos that appeared to show notes in a toilet. In recent weeks, news reports have brought attention to the destruction of records by the Secret Service, Pentagon, and Department of Homeland Security relating to the January 6 insurrection.

Over four years in office, Trump’s behavior was often egregious. He courted Russia in 2016, was impeached for extorting Ukraine, and topped things off by trying to steal the election. But he largely escaped consequences for these offenses, other than losing in 2020. Could his downfall really be about something as mundane as proper handling of sensitive documents? Justice in the U.S. is still blind, despite his protestation, but that doesn’t mean it lacks a sense of humor.

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Deranged lunatic blames Barry Obama for Moron-a-Lago raid??

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OK MAGAtts... this is straight up fucking treason. The orange fuck has to go down for this.....

[Kristy]

No one at the F.B.Eye gave shit until the rumor mill on the ol' orange F A T T Y confirmed he may have stolen himself some nuclear secrets.

Yes, this F A T orange cocksucker with the "classified shit" on every launch trajectory and warhead info waiting on them for his next BDSM session with Putin.

I knew ol orange F A T Y loves a lot of RuZZian dick in his grubby mouth but this is a little scary.

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Here's a very key paragraph in a NY Times article:

The person said the F.B.I. left behind a two-page manifest of what was taken. If the manifest is made public, it is likely to be heavily redacted to shield any classified material.

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.

[Kristy]

I don't believe ol' orange F A T T Y has actual nuclear launch codes as he does where the weapons are stored, how quickly they can be launched, number of warheads, and where the actually targets are - particularly in RuZZia. If that is the case, then this goes beyond treason to espionage to being an all-out serious threat to national security. That would make our military defense highly vulnerable. I can only surmise he did not sell or pass on such info to RuiZZia as he would his Saudi buttbuddies who, in a heartbeat would sell it to places like North Korea.

This country used to shoot such people with firing squads at dawn. Now I wonder if Turtle Boy and his Putin bought-and-pair for GOP would be willing to revisit that you know, being all for "freedom."

Better yet, firing squads should be run like a national lottery.