[August]

I like Byron York's article:

Why they're mad about the Trump raid

by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent |

| August 10, 2022 12:10 PM


WHY THEY'RE MAD ABOUT THE TRUMP RAID. In addition to reporting the nuts and bolts of the FBI's unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump's home in Palm Beach, Florida, much media coverage has also focused on angry Trump supporters, who are portrayed as being whipped up by Republican politicians and MAGA agitators. This is from the Washington Post, about 24 hours after news of the raid broke: "Extremist organizers have tried to hold on to the momentum they built in recent years by finding big-tent causes disparate factions could rally around, such as opposition to pandemic restrictions, 'Stop the Steal' election denial, or an imagined socialist 'indoctrination' of schoolchildren. With each iteration, analysts say, the networks have grown more sophisticated and more violent, as evidenced by the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. The FBI's search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents is now presented as a tipping point, an existential threat to the United States that true patriots must thwart."

Some of the Trump supporters' grievances, such as unhappiness with draconian pandemic restrictions, are real and shared with many other voters. Others are imagined, such as their view of the 2020 election. But what is striking about much media analysis of angry Trump supporters is that it overlooks the main reason for their current anger. They are mad because the Mar-a-Lago raid fits into a pattern of behavior targeting Trump and his associates by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence community — a pattern that dates back to the months before Trump took office in January 2017.

Is it necessary to go over it? One short version of the problem comes from this newsletter on Dec. 11, 2020, calling for Trump to end his election challenges: "An alliance of Trump antagonists in federal law enforcement, intelligence, and the media sought to undermine him from the first moment. From the slick maneuver to publicize the slanders of the Steele dossier to the effort to nail Gen. Michael Flynn to James Comey's game of assuring Trump he was not under investigation while leaving the public impression that he was, and then, to the yearslong Mueller investigation, in which the special counsel discovered early on that the collusion accusation could not be confirmed yet allowed the investigation to go on and on — through all that, Trump faced unprecedented efforts to cripple his presidency and make sure he would not be reelected. In late 2019, House Democrats even impeached the president specifically in hopes that it would weaken him so much that he could not have a second term."

That is not a complete list of grievances. Other examples include the FBI's heavy-handed treatment of Trump associates Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. In the early morning of July 26, 2017, FBI agents, guns drawn, entered Manafort's home in Alexandria, Virginia, to execute a search warrant while Manafort and his wife were at home in bedclothes, having no idea who was coming through the door. "The raid, which occurred without warning ... signaled an aggressive new approach by special counsel Robert Mueller," the Washington Post reported.

Then there was the heavily armed Jan. 25, 2019, arrest of Stone at his house in Florida. Stone's home security system cameras showed agents in tactical gear with assault weapons pointed ahead moving toward Stone's door. They kept the guns trained on a sleepy Stone when he opened the door and was immediately handcuffed.

Both actions seemed like overkill. Not because Manafort and Stone were innocent of any wrongdoing — Manafort was convicted of tax evasion and Stone of lying to Congress — but because the tactics were out of proportion to the situation. And so it seems with the Mar-a-Lago raid. Never before in U.S. history has the FBI raided the residence of a former president. By any account, it was a "major escalation" of the investigation into Trump.

But an investigation of what? At the moment, it appears the raid was done because of a document-handling dispute. When the news first broke, many commentators, including some who are highly critical of Trump, said that an action so momentous — a raid on a former president's home — must have been done for reasons more momentous than a conflict over the Presidential Records Act. Politico Playbook wrote, "One perplexing aspect of the Mar-a-Lago search, at least to some legal analysts, is the crime reportedly being investigated does not seem to match the unprecedented tactic of an FBI raid on a former president's residence."

"They've crossed the Rubicon here," the anti-Trump attorney George Conway said of the Justice Department Tuesday morning. "Not even Richard Nixon's house in San Clemente was searched by the FBI, as far as I know. ... You have to conclude there's something behind the curtain that would surprise us."

So the prevailing opinion was, for the FBI to do something so aggressive, it must be for a really big reason. That was a tacit admission that the FBI's tactics appeared to be excessive if the matter was simply a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act. And yet, for the moment at least, that is the best state of our knowledge of the raid. Christina Bobb, one of Trump's lawyers who was at Mar-a-Lago and saw the search warrant, told Dinesh D'Souza's podcast, "It's all about [the National Archives and Records Administration] and the Records Preservation Act. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with Jan. 6. They say that they were looking for presidential records ... and potential crimes of releasing classified information, or something to that effect. So they have basically turned the FBI into overzealous librarians."

Who knows what the reality is? In the end, it might turn out that the original impressions were right, that the raid really was about more than the National Archives and the Presidential Records Act. But at the moment, it appears the FBI has again engaged in its trademark anti-Trump overkill. And that's why many of the former president's supporters are angry. No, that does not justify violence on anyone's part. It doesn't justify an ugly riot like Jan. 6. But of course Trump's supporters are angry at the FBI. From their point of view, it's the old unfair treatment happening again.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...the-trump-raid