The Patriot Post® · Demo DoJ Document Double Standards: Clinton v. Trump
Regarding the initial execution of the Biden/DoJ warrant at the Florida home of Donald Trump last week, reportedly to recover classified materials that may not have been properly declassified and/or were wrongly in Trump’s possession, I noted, “If this raid was based only on a warrant for National Archive material, then it will serve as another hit to the FBI’s widening credibility gap with the public.” That would be a credibility gap with FBI leadership, not rank-and-file agents, who are now the lightning rod for corrupt leadership. Frank Miele at RealClear Politics now refers to the FBI as the “Federal Bureau of Intimidation.”
As it turns out, the warrant was to recover National Archive files, and the search warrant language was very broad, specifying, “All physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation” of federal statutes related to records, and, “Any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021.” I would note this language, and the references to Espionage Act violations, which lit the Leftmedia’s hair on fire, is all boilerplate language included in such warrants.
A review of the inventory removed from Trump’s home included 11 sets of classified documents. Trump’s passport was also seized (as if he was a flight risk) but has been returned.
The media talkingheads and scribes will have much more to churn in the coming weeks from strategic “leaks” about the documents and pending charges, designed to, déjà vu, imply Trump was a Vladimir Putin operative all along.
Legal analyst Andrew McCarthy asserts that the warrant was a discovery effort to provide more fodder for Nancy Pelosi’s theatrical J6 “Insurrection™ Inquisition.”
As for Team Biden’s claims that neither he nor his staff were notified in advance about the raid, McCarthy notes: “I can think of a million things they might have done short of a search warrant. But I can’t think of a single scenario in which, if the facts are as government sources claim they are, Biden would not have been in the loop.” Of course, Joe and the “smartest guy” he knows, Hunter Biden, are on vacation this week at a wealthy retreat island in South Carolina, so don’t expect to hear from him.
Clearly, Biden’s AG Merrick Garland has boldly weaponized the Department of Justice.
This warrant is the latest chapter in the “dirty tricks” playbook previously used by a corrupt deep state cabal within the FBI and CIA under former Directors James Comey and John Brennan. They, in collaboration with Hillary Clinton, were responsible for the fake “Russia collusion” conspiracy, a political setup to take Trump down.
According to Trump: “Number one, it was all declassified. Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request… ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?” However, all of those Obama documents are claimed to be catalogued and under the control of the National Archives.
There are likely legitimate questions about proper declassification of those docs, and unsubstantiated reports that negotiations for the return of the materials had stalled. But regardless of the classification issue, they still belong to the National Archives, not Trump.
But as the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman ponders: “If papers in former President Donald Trump’s home represented such a grave threat to national security, why did the Justice Department take so long to act on it? Among the implausible details of this disturbing story has been that after a Justice official and several FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago in early June, Justice waited several days before merely requesting that a stronger lock be placed on the door of a storage room and then waited roughly two months before seeking a warrant.”
That notwithstanding, Trump asked a good question about Barack Obama’s presidential papers. But a much more relevant question pertaining to any prosecutable offenses would be one of double standards.
Recall all the classified “Top Secret” information Hillary Clinton transmitted on her personal email accounts and maintained on servers hidden in her residential closet, which she had her staff “wipe” ahead of the 2016 election to hide her communications from any future public scrutiny. I covered those actions in detail in “Clinton’s Secret Communication Subterfuge.”
Recall also that in July 2016, ahead of the presidential election, then-FBI Director Comey reopened the FBI investigation into Clinton’s coms, then took the unusual step of exonerating Clinton from any prosecutable offense under 18 U.S. Code § 793 in a public statement. He did so despite the fact he knew then that Clinton’s unsecured coms and servers had been compromised by foreign intelligence hackers — likely Russian.
According to Comey, Clinton set up and used “several different [private] servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.”
But here is the key to Comey’s justification for exonerating Clinton: He also said that “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”
Let’s be clear: Maintaining hard copies of some documents in a secured area of a former president’s house, which is protected by the Secret Service among other law enforcement security personnel, is a minuscule national security risk compared to transmitting and storing highly classified information electronically in an unsecured residence.
Of course, any objective observer knew that Comey’s higher loyalty was to Clinton’s campaign. Further, Comey then provided the layup for the fake “Russian collusion” investigation of Trump, which took three years to totally debunk by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — but the intended damage to Trump’s agenda was done.
Other than the upcoming DoJ leaks I anticipate will keep the MSM juice flowing, as I noted last week the devil is in the warrant details, specifically the affidavits to secure the warrants. Trump has called for release of those affidavits, but DoJ is declining, insisting that would compromise their investigation. Intelligence Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) are insisting the affidavits and more details about the documents seized be shared with their committee in a classified briefing.
No response from DoJ.
For the record, as also noted last week, Demos’ actions are baiting violence, and that is precisely their calculation. The Demo proliferators of hate and division are banking their political fortunes on violence that they can attribute to “Trump supporters.” Make no mistake, Democrat strategists calculate that the Left’s attacks will lure mentally unstable sociopathic conspiracy nuts out of their rat holes into acts of violence.
To that end, days later the DoJ issued warnings to FBI offices and agents about the threat of violence against them.
In response, Trump declared: “The country is in a very dangerous position. There is tremendous anger, like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one — years of scams and witch hunts, and now this. There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country — at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times.”
Having said all that, Trump then issued this offer to DoJ: “If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that.”
And a few other observations…
As for AG Garland, legal scholar Jonathan Turley notes that his stature is rapidly shrinking. According to Turley: “In his confirmation hearing, Garland repeatedly pledged that political considerations would hold no sway with him as attorney general. Yet, in just two years, the Justice Department has careened from one political controversy to another without any sign that Garland is firmly in control of the department.”
As for the Biden/Demo ulterior motive for the raid? You may conclude that every aspect of this seizure and how it will be handled between now and the midterm elections will be subject to Demo political choreography. They are smart and calculating and hope to gin up protests by conservative politicians and media, and will then expose something in the documents that will embarrass Trump, et al. To that end, Trump has claimed that the FBI planted something they claimed to have seized in the raid, which sounds like a setup to assert something embarrassing was a plant.
Finally, as I have stated previously about the Demos’ motive, whoever the Demo presidential nominee will be in 2024 (and I assert again it will not be Biden), they absolutely want Trump to run again. Despite their “Br'er Rabbit” strategy of insisting they don’t want Trump to run, they are in fact baiting him to do so, certain they can win on the hate and division they can foment against a Trump candidacy — as they did in 2020.
Footnote: In a textbook case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who has now lost all of his marbles, suggested Trump should be executed like the Rosenbergs for giving nuke secrets to Russia.
(Updated)
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776