DOJ reticence gave Trump’s conspiracy theorists free rein

You knew as much about the Mar-a-Lago affair as Rick Scott. Which, shorn of speculation and bombast and Nazi allusions, wasn’t much.

Nor did the paucity of information temper Marco Rubio’s reaction. The senator compared Monday’s search for purloined documents to atrocities committed in his usual commie bugaboos: (choose one) Nicaragua, Cuba or Venezuela.

The perpetually angry Ron DeSantis — similarly undaunted by a lack of knowledge — charged that the search of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach digs was “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies.” Soon a gang of postal workers and IRS accountants will be laying siege to the governor’s mansion.

DeSantis suggested that the Biden administration had created a “banana republic,” the very term Democrats invoked the previous week after Florida’s tin-pot governor ousted a twice-elected state attorney in Hillsborough County. (Not for something State Attorney Andrew Warren did or failed to do, mind you, but for something DeSantis thought he might not do.)

No points were awarded for originality among other Republican leaders, who contrived their own banana republic analogies. (With no mention of the subtropical autocracy called Florida.) “This is what happens in South American banana republics,” said Vern Buchanan, a congressman from Sarasota County.

GOP politicians who had made so much of the left-wing fringe’s very dumb “defund police” slogan in 2020 were furiously tweeting, “Defund the FBI” this past week.

Obviously, Trumpsters don’t oppose the concept of the FBI investigating a presidential contender’s handling of classified documents. Whenever Trump mentions Hillary Clinton’s emails, his followers chant, “Lock her up!” They just don’t think worldly laws apply to their otherworldly deity.

A gunman in Ohio demonstrated the dangerous corollary to this incendiary rhetoric. Caught up in the MAGA reaction to the Mar-a-Lago search, he posted a “call to arms” and suggested killing FBI agents on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform. On Thursday, the gunman attempted just that at the FBI field office in Cincinnati. The attack failed. Six hours later, he was killed in a shootout with police.

Once, responsible elected officials would have waited for actual info before attacking the feds, mindful that reckless talk nowadays can trigger real violence. Jan. 6 was not so long ago.

Instead, GOP pols felt compelled to feign outrage against the FBI, secretly praying — please God, just this once — that no evidence of Trump wrongdoing surfaces before the next election.

Quaint notions about civic responsibility have been lost amid the constant need to regale social media and cable television with instant, provocative, imprudent speculation — the lifeblood of modern politics.

This was the ethic, no doubt, that induced Scott to compare the FBI to the Gestapo. The senator forgot that certain Florida constituents know too well the difference between Nazi murderers and FBI agents.

Scott attacked the FBI, though he knew that the National Archives and Records Administration had tried for two years to recover classified documents removed when Trump left the White House. Federal law, signed by Trump in 2018, calls that a felony.

Scott didn’t seem to consider that the documents sought by the FBI were deemed so important to national security that Attorney General Merrick Garland was willing to endure a political firestorm to retrieve them.

Of course, it was the Department of Justice’s reluctance to explain the urgency of the operation that allowed loony FBI conspiracy theories to flourish. But Garland was restrained by longtime DOJ policies designed to protect the rights of someone under federal investigation. Which this particular someone was happy to exploit.

Finally, on Thursday, DOJ petitioned the federal magistrate in Palm Beach County to unseal the search warrant, along with an inventory of material recovered from Mar-aLago.

All along, Trump had been free to release the stuff himself; let the public decide if something untoward was afoot. He preferred to let America simmer. (Perhaps Trump hoped to delay disclosure until after he released his income tax returns.)

The dearth of verifiable facts served Trump well, allowing his sycophants to fill the information vacuum with whacko theories and allusions to Nazism and banana republics.

His crazies even doxed the federal magistrate for signing the search warrant, assailing him with insults and death threats.

Trump, of course, characterized the FBI operation as something “corrupt at a level not seen before.” He complained, “Such an assault could only take place in broken, third-world countries.”

There’s a lot of GOP pols forced to defend Generalissimo Trump who wouldn’t mind if he and his ego disappeared into the jungles of one of those broken third-world banana republics. But that sentiment is classified as “top secret.”