When the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the allegations of overreach were resurrected, along with the absurd narrative around the Russian collusion hoax. The Justice Department threw a dragnet on the former president's home to find something that could tie him to that long-debunked Democratic Party myth. The additional layers of inanity revolved around the suspicion that classified nuclear secrets were on the premises. Was this a Hail Mary throw to find anything to disqualify the former president from running again based on the Russian investigation? Probably. It was undoubtedly executed as a warning for him not to run again. Even liberals can see that, though they probably relish agents of the state being used to harass their political enemies. But another theory has been mentioned, again casting the FBI in an irresponsible light.
Was this raid done to find corroborating evidence on January 6 and boost its profile in the national media? Conservative commentator Erick Erickson has mentioned this, along with Alina Habba, an attorney for Donald Trump. Erickson thought the raid was a "fishing expedition" to find damning documents linking the president to the riot. Habba added in a Fox News interview that the federal ransacking was ordered to increase attention about the riot while boosting ratings for the select committee, which includes soon-to-be-booted Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), investigating the event (via Axios):
Former President Trump's lawyer told Fox News Friday that the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home was an attempt to spin up negative attention that the probe into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot has failed to generate.
Driving the news: “In my opinion, the Jan. 6 ratings — the show of Jan. 6 — hasn't been going so well,” said Alina Habba, an attorney for Trump on Friday's episode of "Jesse Watters Primetime." “They needed a little drama, so they throw this out there.”
What she’s saying: Habba also questioned why Judge Bruce Reinhart was allowed to sign off on the search warrant.
“They go to the judge that had recused himself in my Hillary [Clinton] case a month ago,” Habba said. “I would like to know why he recused himself in that case, but then he was able to sign this warrant. I want to know that.”
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These hearings are hardcore, inside-the-beltway material since they’ve held primetime hearings for weeks which the American people have paid little attention to amid the growing list of domestic crises impacting the country. Also, the FBI’s report last summer cited that January 6 was not “the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result” and that were was “no evidence that he [President Trump] or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence.” Of course, the Left would highlight the words “so far,” they haven’t found evidence, “so far,” but that report got released in August of 2021. If the FBI could find people based on facial recognition technology or by tracing the type of clothing one was wearing from security footage inside the Capitol, arrest them, and throw them into jail—they would have found a smoking gun on any connection between Trump and the January 6 riot. They didn’t.
It’s part of a long list of events and documents that underscore the legitimacy behind this FBI ransacking of Mar-a-Lago. A Trump attorney had certified in June that there were no classified materials at the residence. Attorney-client or executive privilege protected some of the other documents seized by federal agents. And the trove of records about Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI spy operation on the 2016 Trump campaign, was declassified in January of 2021. The Trump White House issued a memo in its final hours.
The haranguing of classified materials is also a red herring since the president is the ultimate declassifying authority, and the regulations regarding classification do not apply to the president. The Supreme Court affirmed this in 1987. The Left better not be hoping to get Trump on a mishandling of classified materials beef because that’s just not happened, sort of like how Trump is a Kremlin agent was never within the realm of possibility.
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