(Update: Thanks to Batocchio for sharing this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Here's hoping we all survive this trumpian mess...)
The reaction to Monday's warranted search of donald trump's Mar-A-Lago resort for classified documents just keeps ratcheting upward to new levels of wingnut farce and legal resolve.
Due to trump publicly denouncing the FBI search as "a raid" and implying that the whole thing was improper, Attorney General Merrick Garland came out this afternoon at a press conference to inform the media that A) He himself signed off on getting the warrant, B) the warrant was necessary after months of delays and denials by trump about the stolen documents, C) there were national security concerns about those documents, and that D) in order to prove all that, the Department of Justice was putting in a request to unseal the portions of the warrant - stuff already known to trump and his lawyers - to the general public as trump "insisted" they should know.
You could kind of hear a large "Oh CRAP" scream halfway across the state of Florida emanating from the shores of Palm Beach at the moment Garland called trump's bluff.
trump, you see, loves playing the victim as much as playing a hero. As long as the FBI and Justice Department kept their investigations into his activities under wraps, trump could complain to his rabid voting base that he's being targeted for a partisan "witch hunt" and that he's the noble suffering martyr to the wingnut cause.
By making the move to unseal the warrant they gave trump's lawyers, the Justice Department is going to reveal exactly HOW they got the warrant, WHAT it focused on finding, WHY it had to happen, and above all discredit all the Far Right media allegations of 'planted' evidence and agency 'misconduct'. trump can no longer play the victim when that happens: At that point, the warrant is going to reveal WHO is a criminal suspect (hint: his nickname rhymes with 'Gitshibbon').
Let's go to legal expert Emptywheel for her take on today's bombshell:
But (Garland)’s not asking to unseal the whole warrant application.
On the contrary. He’s only unsealing precisely the documents that Trump already has in his possession: the warrant itself and Appendices A (describing this house) and B (describing what can be seized). Indeed, the motion notes that the FBI gave Trump these documents...
These documents are precisely the ones that Trump could have released all by himself, but chose not to. He could object now. But if he did, it would make clear — as if all the refusals to release it to journalists hasn’t already — that it’s really damning.
And now — in a short announcement where he took no questions, but where Garland made a fierce defense of DOJ and the FBI — Garland is calling Trump’s bluff...
trump can't afford to let the warrant go public, because it'll reveal that the FBI has legitimate reasons to search Mar-A-Lago in the first place. But trump's made so much noise about it already that if he turns around and demands the warrant be kept private, he'll be admitting to the public that he's in deep legal trouble anyway.
For his entire adult life, donald trump has played the legal system like a game. he avoided accountability for his criminal and civil misdeeds ever since he was a corrupt NYC landlord in the 1970s. trump played the bankruptcy rules like a lark keeping himself afloat while screwing his creditors, running his casinos into the ground and repeatedly pushing his business empire into more questionable - if not outright criminal - actions.
As long as he kept his army of lawyers well-paid and aggressively hounding his victims into despair, trump had no respect for anything or anyone (other than the dictators he admired as powerful men who answered to no one, like he wants to be).
Thing is, trump seems to have crossed a serious line here. While he got away with bending breaking the rules about national security as he sat in the White House, the second trump got kicked out of office he became accountable for all the documents he stole and all the secret intel he's likely exposed.
trump's still trying to play all of this like a game only he is allowed to win.
But he's playing against a federal government that no longer answers to him, that no longer lets him cheat. The Justice Department apparently could tolerate trump's decades of business fraud, the agency had to tolerate the damage he did when he became President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice), but the rule of law has to kick in now that trump is breaking laws - possibly committing acts of espionage - that cannot be shrugged away.
All that's left now is for AG Garland to tell trump to his face "Game Over."
1 comment:
The warrant and manifest were published today, and while the classified stuff is not specifically identified, the fact that there was lots of it was.
He could get away with his disregard for rules and laws while he was just a corrupt real estate guy losing a half billion of his daddy's dollars and the worst he would face down was an assistant DA from NYC, and while he had main justice in his thrall, but now he's just tfg, looking down the barrel of a DOJ tasked with undoing the damage he did to it.
I predict it will not go well for him.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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