The FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home reportedly connected to Trump’s handling of official documents.
Summary
The FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home reportedly connected to Trump’s handling of official documents.
- The Bureau launched the unannounced raid Monday morning and spent “the majority of the day” searching Mar-a-Lago. Former President Trump was in New York at the time of the FBI search.
- The former president publicized the FBI raid in a lengthy statement, saying Mar-a-Lago was “currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” adding, “They even broke into my safe!”
- The White House, the Department of Justice, and the FBI have all refused to comment on the raid.
- The dramatic law enforcement escalation was reportedly part of an FBI investigation into whether the former president took classified records to Mar-a-Lago after he left office.
- The National Archives and Records Administration recovered 15 boxes of classified material from Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, and the NARA reportedly referred the case to the Justice Department.
- An FBI raid on a former president’s home is unprecedented in American history.
- House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vowed to investigate Attorney General Merrick Garland should Republicans retake the House majority and decried the “intolerable state of weaponized politicization” of the Department of Justice.
- The New York Times reported House Republicans were “unified” in their response to the raid, with even relative moderates like Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, demanding “an immediate briefing” from Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray and others predicting investigations as soon as the party retakes the majority.
- CNN wrote the search “unleashed a historic political storm” and threatens “to inject new toxins into the political life of a nation that is hopelessly divided.” CNN wrote, “there is no room for error for the Justice Department or the FBI” on a decision of this magnitude.
- POLITICO reported the White House was not given advance notice of the raid, although no Biden administration officials have yet commented on the unprecedented FBI raid on a potential 2024 rival of President Biden.
- National Review’s Charlie Cooke criticized the mainstream media for immediately assuming the raid must be justified. Cooke urged Biden to immediately make the warrant public and to personally explain the justification for the raid. If the raid is unjustified, “Garland must resign” and the FBI should be “examined and reformed as a matter of utmost priority.”
- The Washington Examiner called the FBI raid “manna from heaven politically for Trump” with the potential to turn Trump into a martyr at a time when “the Department of Justice chooses to ignore Hunter Biden’s laptop and lets far-left activists harass Supreme Court justices in their homes.”
- Breitbart published the “defiant” video message Donald Trump released the morning after the FBI raid. Trump blasted President Biden for leading “a nation in decline” and decried “the weaponization of law enforcement.” The video ended with the tagline: “the best is yet to come.”
Author’s Take
Many cable news figures repeated the phrase “no one is above the law” to justify the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago. It’s true that leaders of France, South Korea, and Israel have been jailed for crimes after leaving office, and their countries’ democracies survived. Serving as president of the United States should not necessarily grant former presidents lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution. That being said, taking the extraordinary step of raiding a former president’s home requires iron-clad justification. A raid of this magnitude should have only occurred if absolutely necessary to investigate a serious crime after all other options were exhausted.
After politically biased FBI officials investigated Trump for years over the largely baseless Trump-Russia conspiracy theories pushed by Hillary Clinton, the FBI’s word is not sufficient. If the Department of Justice raided Mar-a-Lago without proper justification, Attorney General Garland must resign immediately and every 2024 Republican presidential candidate should make reforming and depoliticizing the FBI a top priority.
President Biden must immediately make public the search warrant justifying the FBI raid. The FBI and Department of Justice’s silence is unacceptable. Americans deserve to know the justification behind the unprecedented deployment of law enforcement power against a former President of the United States.
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© Dominic Moore, 2022
