Tipsheet

The Next Chapter of the FBI's Trump Raid Saga Just Dropped

Of course this development would drop late at night. The Biden Department of Justice has declared that Donald Trump’s ‘special master’ request to review the documents the FBI seized in their August 8 raid of Mar-a-Lago should be denied on national security grounds. You heard that right; the Justice Department thinks that reviewing the letters to Trump from Kim Jong-un would endanger us irreparably. The cocktail napkins have nuclear codes on them. Photographs of state dinners would lead to nuclear war, and the dinner menus could reveal who killed John F. Kennedy. At least this development has a tinge of entertainment value. The most recent updates have been grounded in email exchanges between lawyers that didn’t show any criminal or prevaricating intent on behalf of Trump’s lawyers. There was no smoking gun. And now, if anyone but us, the DOJ, review the documents we took in an unlawful search, it’s a national security risk. Last weekend, a judge announced her preliminary intent to appoint a special master to review the records, which the DOJ also said was unnecessary since they had analyzed them:

The Justice Department said Tuesday night that appointing a special master "is unnecessary and would significantly harm important governmental interests, including national security interests."

The Justice Department attempted to bolster its case to the court by including an FBI photo showing documents and "classified cover sheets recovered from a container" in former President Donald Trump's "45 office," a reference to Trump’s being the 45th president. The photo shows documents marked “secret,” “top secret” and “SCI” — which stands for highly classified “sensitive compartmented information.”

In its late-night court filing, the Justice Department said that some of the documents seized were so sensitive and classified that FBI agents and Justice Department attorneys needed additional security clearances to review them.  (NBC News)

The Justice Department didn’t find anything to corroborate the Left’s nonsensical conspiracy theories about Trump regarding the January 6 riot, the Russian collusion hoax, or his tax returns. They got nothing—we would have heard something by now, given how leak-prone the DOJ and FBI have become on anything Trump-related. The latest legal salvo also points to a total lack of care inside the DOJ regarding public opinion. They seem content that a significant chunk of the country thinks they executed a politically motivated search warrant to benefit the Democratic Party. The stench of banana republicanism has reached the rafters.

Also, all that talk about Justice Department employees being apolitical, professional, and loyal public servants that Attorney General Merrick Garland babbled about during his mortifying presser got hurled into the furnace. They’re cornered, have nowhere to go, and are doubling down hard because these so-called classified documents are probably not all that sensitive. They’re not nuclear secrets. It’s the classic example of the government overclassifying documents, which Mike Davis, a former law clerk to Neil Gorsuch, alluded to in the wake of this raid. We also know that federal agents absconded with records that shouldn’t have been taken, like those protected under attorney-client privilege.

And again, classified documents are not an issue here. Trump was the president. He can declassify any record with absolute authority. The media is trying to make this seem like a Hillary Clinton-like story. It’s not. She did mishandle classified information since she was never president, had an email server that was not authorized or secured from which she transmitted classified information as secretary of state, and destroyed 33,000 emails under federal subpoena. Hillary’s communications set-up was designed to circumvent public records regulations. She also destroyed government-issued blackberries with hammers and bleached her servers. Yet, there was no FBI raid. There should have been, but Hillary’s a Democrat.

This isn’t an apples-to-apples story concerning the handling of sensitive materials. Suggesting that makes this even more humiliating for the media, who appear to have surrendered trying to get Trump on Russian collusion or his taxes. It’s now shoveling out nothing burger stories about how the president somehow doesn’t ever handle or view classified information and doesn’t have the authority to declassify such materials. That’s simply not based on reality or the law.