Why the FBI’s raid on Trump’s swanky Palm Beach home made America – and the free world – a less safe place
Those who’ve seen or spoken to Donald Trump this week say he’s more energised and confident about a political comeback than at any time since he reluctantly left the White house in January 2021, falsely claiming to have won the presidential election.
Far from being cowed by Monday’s FBI raid on his Florida home, he’s buoyed up by the Republican party rallying behind him with one voice, boasting that even long-standing critics in his own party have publicly condemned the FBI and backed him.
The gerontocracy that controls the Democrats was hoping the FBI raid would discredit Trump and deter him from another bid for the presidency. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
The raid has boomeranged badly on the Biden administration, making it more certain than ever that Trump will run again for the Republican nomination, more likely than ever to win it (indeed, as things stand, he’s unstoppable) — and start the next presidential election race as likely favourite to re-take the White house in November 2024, whoever his Democratic opponent.
It’s quite a week’s work for the ancient bumblers at the top of the Democratic party machine. If you’re partial to conspiracy theories you might even conclude that the Democrats have been secretly infiltrated by folks whose mission it is to give Trump a new lease of political life.
of course, there’s much we still don’t know about what lies behind the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Florida’s swanky Palm Beach. It could be the Feds were in pursuit of documents devastating to Trump’s hopes of reviving his political ambitions. But that remains to be established.
The Biden-appointed attorney general, Merrick Garland, the government’s chief law officer, who approved the warrant for the search (which also had to be sanctioned by a federal judge), decided on Thursday it should be made public. Trump did not contest that, perhaps because it doesn’t reveal much.
LasT night the warrant was officially released. It disclosed the FBI removed 20 boxes from Mar-a-Lago including 11 sets of classified documents, some marked top secret.
That sounds serious but there are no details of what’s in the documents and Trump says he declassified the material while still President, which was in his power. Whether that was done properly remains to be seen.
The affidavit accompanying the warrant would be much more revealing since that would contain the reasons for seeking a warrant. But, so far, there are no plans to publish that, even in redacted form.
so america is still largely in the dark as to why the Biden administration took the unprecedented step of raiding the residence of a former President, with dozens of agents scouring the property, including Melania Trump’s bedroom, while others armed to the teeth stood guard outside.
(It wasn’t clear who they thought might threaten them since Palm Beach, a billionaires’ enclave, is not exactly renowned for even peaceful street demonstrations, never mind armed uprisings.)
such heavy-handed tactics are unlikely to have been prompted by a desire to retrieve some historical presidential documents that belong in the national archives.
Now, it is true that Trump departed the White house with boxes of documents that should have been left behind to be archived, whether intentionally or because of the chaotic nature of his departure is not clear. and that is a felony.
a dozen boxes were returned almost immediately and negotiations continued about those that remained at Mar-a-Lago. Two months ago, the FBI asked if they could be put under lock and key while the issue was resolved. Trump’s people complied. The lock was smashed in Monday’s raid.
Just why talks were abandoned is not clear. If the emphasis is now being put on the top secret nature of the documents it’s not obvious why the FBI waited so long to retrieve them.
The Washington Post floated the idea that Trump was harbouring documents about america’s nuclear weapons. Its story was unsourced and contained no verifiable facts, much less a motive to explain why the former President would want to hoard such material.
But its report was so dark and full of foreboding that you could be forgiven for thinking Trump had absconded with the presidential briefcase (or ‘football’ as it’s known) containing the U.s. nuclear missile launch codes. Last night’s revelations made no mention of nuclear secrets.
It’s hard not to conclude that the raid was at least partly motivated by the fact that the Democrats are still scouring for evidence to link Trump to the Capitol hill riot on January 6, 2021.
a Democrat-dominated congressional committee has held hearings this year which have revealed some appalling things about the last days of the Trump administration.
But not enough to charge Trump with inciting the rioters, which is what the Democrats want because that really would kill off his political career. Is it not possible that Trump absconded with damning evidence showing he was indeed stoking an insurrection from the White house? For Democrats such a prospect is enough to justify the FBI being as heavy-handed as it wants.
support for this theory came only the day after the Mar-a-Lago raid when scott Perry, a five-term Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, was intercepted while travelling with his family by three FBI agents demanding he hand over his personal mobile phone. he had no choice but to comply with their warrant.
Now Perry is a Trump fanatic who goes along with all the former President’s nonsense about being cheated out of victory in the 2020 election. he was in regular touch with Trump in the dying days of his administration.
But even fanatics have constitutional rights and what happened to Trump has added to a sense among Republicans that the FBI is allowing itself to become the law-enforcement arm of the Democratic party, traducing individual rights in the process.
after all, if the FBI can be high-handed with a former President and sitting congressman, what defences do ordinary americans have?
attorney General Garland was outraged by such suggestions, claiming the job of the FBI was to make sure nobody was above the law (unless, of course, you’re hillary Clinton with 30,000 official emails on her private email server and aides that took a hammer to her devices, or hunter Biden with a laptop full of incriminating material — neither of which the FBI has been much bothered about).
Republican hotheads didn’t help rational debate by referring to the FBI as ‘Biden’s Gestapo’. But in recent years the FBI has forfeited its right to be regarded as above politics.
It went along with the longrunning fake news that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election, until the exhaustive Mueller report failed to find a scintilla of evidence, revealing it was essentially a hoax.
It gave credence to the notorious steele dossier — another attempt to smear Trump with Russian links — which turned out to be a pack of lies.
AND it omitted key facts and made false statements when applying for court orders to conduct covert surveillance on Carter Page, a Trump associate wrongly accused of involvement in the supposed Trump-Russia conspiracy.
after all that it’s not so much of a stretch for many Republicans to conclude that the FBI would go along with Democratic demands to investigate their political rivals.
as Friday’s Wall street Journal opined: ‘There are plenty of reasons for americans to take a don’t-trust-but-verify attitude to the FBI. This isn’t disdain for the rule of law. It’s wellearned scepticism.’
Public scepticism about the FBI has been on the rise for years — and not just among Republicans. In a recent poll, conducted before the Mar-a-Lago raid, almost half of americans said they no longer trusted the FBI. That is likely to be well above 50 per cent now.
More important, this past week will only exacerbate a debilitating cycle of reprisal and escalation between america’s two main parties.
Republican minority leader in the house, Kevin McCarthy, is already warning that if his party reclaims control of Congress in this November’s mid-term elections ‘we will conduct immediate oversight of the Department of Justice, follow the facts, leave no stone unturned. attorney General Garland — preserve your documents, clear your calendar.’
It is, perhaps, an understandable response to recent events. But it is also deeply depressing.
It means american politics will remain dominated by the sound of adversaries ripping each other apart, using arms of the state whenever they can for added leverage, while the huge international issues to which the free world still looks to america for leadership — a revanchist Russia, a totalitarian China, an ailing global economy — will remain neglected and unresolved.
This past week will only exacerbate a debilitating cycle of reprisal and escalation