August 22, 2022

Report: FBI Was After Docs Trump Believed Would ‘Exonerate’ Him

Two weeks after the unprecedented FBI raid, we have very little reliable information about what the bureau was looking for.

Wait a sec. We thought the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home two weeks ago to recover top-secret information about our nation’s nuclear secrets.

After all, that’s what we were told by The Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media, right? That Trump had unlawfully been storing those nuclear weapons documents there at his Florida home since he left the White House, right?

No doubt Trump, whom that same mainstream media had for years falsely accused of colluding with Russia, was now poised to sell those top-secret nuclear documents to those same scheming Russians, right?

Well, not so fast. Another week, another leak. What we’re hearing now is still speculation, just as last week’s reporting from the Post was, but now we’re told that the feds were worried that Trump might “weaponize” certain materials he’d been collecting in order to exonerate himself, perhaps during the upcoming 2024 presidential campaign. As Newsweek reports:

To justify the unprecedented raid on a former president’s residence and protect the source who revealed the existence of Trump’s private hoard, agents went into Trump’s residence on the pretext that they were seeking all government documents, says one official who has been involved in the investigation. But the true target was this private stash, which Justice Department officials feared Donald Trump might weaponize.

“They collected everything that rightfully belonged to the U.S. government but the true target was these documents that Trump had been collecting since early in his administration,” says the source, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

The New York Times also gives credence to this focus on the Russia collusion hoax. “One of the few robust discussions about government documents at the end of the Trump administration focused on Crossfire Hurricane,” the Times reports, “the F.B.I. investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian officials. While that inquiry, which began in 2016, did not ultimately accuse Mr. Trump of criminal behavior, he remained obsessed with it throughout his term.”

Whoa. Donald Trump was obsessed with Crossfire Hurricane? What about the mainstream media? And what about the deep state that concocted that whole fake, phony, and fraudulent hoax to wreck his presidency?

As for storing all those sensitive documents at his home, everyone knows they’d have been much safer if only they’d been kept at the National Archives. There in the secure, tightly monitored confines of the Archives, classified documents would be much less likely to be stuffed into the socks of say, a former Clinton-era national security advisor, then surreptitiously smuggled out of the building and destroyed.

As The Times continues:

In Mr. Trump’s last weeks in office, [former Trump Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows, with the president’s blessing, prodded federal law enforcement agencies to declassify a binder of Crossfire Hurricane materials that included unreleased information about the F.B.I.‘s investigative steps and text messages between two former top F.B.I. officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who had sharply criticized Mr. Trump in their private communications during the 2016 election.

The F.B.I. worried that releasing more information could compromise the bureau, according to people familiar with the debate. Mr. Meadows dismissed those arguments, saying that Mr. Trump himself wanted the information declassified and disseminated, they said.

Just three days before Mr. Trump’s last day in office, the White House and the F.B.I. settled on a set of redactions, and Mr. Trump declassified the rest of the binder. Mr. Meadows intended to give the binder to at least one conservative journalist, according to multiple people familiar with his plan. But he reversed course after Justice Department officials pointed out that disseminating the messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page could run afoul of privacy law, opening officials up to suits.

Curiously, the Times then reports that none of those Strzok-Page documents “or any other materials pertaining to the Russia investigation” were believed to be among those seized by the FBI during its Mar-a-Lago raid.

So we’re still not sure what documents were seized from Trump’s home or why. And, we suspect, that’s just the way the Biden Justice Department wants it.

That might not be the case for much longer, though. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart called the raid “unprecedented” and formally rejected the Biden DOJ’s argument to keep the entire search affidavit under seal. According to Reinhart, “Particularly given the intense public and historical interest in an unprecedented search of a former President’s residence, the Government has not yet shown that these administrative concerns are sufficient to justify sealing.”

Reinhart says the government has yet to make the case for keeping the affidavit sealed, and he gave the DOJ an “opportunity to propose redaction” with a deadline of noon this Thursday. In doing so, Reinhart has accomplished the rare feat of bringing together the Fake News media and Donald Trump. Whereas the government wants to keep the American people in the dark about the what and the why of the raid, both the media and the former president are in favor of transparency.

For his part, Trump has filed suit challenging the search, and is requesting appointment of special master to review the documents seized – a measure Judge Reinhart is not likely to approve.


Updated to include some thoughts on the security of the National Archives, and new information about the potential release of the Mar-a-Lago raid affidavit.

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