If It Was A Fishing Expedition, What Were They Fishing For?

There's an emerging consensus that the Mar-a-Lago raid was a fishing expedition in search of something, maybe anything, that would get Trump once and for all, but one pesky issue as far as I can see is that this was a very high risk operation. Even if the White House, the Justice Department, and the FBI were collectively oblivious to this risk in their weeks of deliberation, the actual downside was evident the moment the raid became news. This was high risk that had to be justified by a high reward unless the actors involved were much, much dumber than we thought.

So what would have justified the risk? It's hard to envision what it could be -- we can pretty much rule out nuclear secrets at this point, since we've been told the big suits dithered at length over whether to go in. It's also hard to imagine that it was just an open-ended dragnet looking for anything from kiddie porn to a cocaine stash -- and whatever it might have been, it sounds like somebody had to report, "Well, sir, we didn't get that, but we did find his passports, and we got those!!"

I gave up on the tinfoil hat blogs like Conservaive Treehouse and Gateway Pundit after Sidney Powell ordered the kraken released, but it wasn't. Nevertheless, Gateway Pundit had at least a faint glimmer of a lead yesterday:

The brazen raid of President Trump’s home in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, likely has its roots in the Russia collusion story with a particular focus on Peter Strzok and his affiliation with the CIA.

The piece goes on to argue that Strzok was never an FBI employee, he was always with the CIA, but he was working under FBI cover to allow the CIA to do domestic spying. Or something. And Trump has a memo that proves it. Well, Strzok is old news if nothing else, but I can't imagine anything having to do with Strzok, a clown with a name nobody would want in junior high school, would be enough of a bombshell that the FBI would need to go in and retrieve it.

Robert Barnes, an attorney and amateur political analyst who appears frequently on the Viva Frei and People's Pundit Daily YouTube channels, has another take as recounted here:

Federal defense attorney and aggressive Con Law advocate, Robert Barnes, has an unexpected take on the Deep State’s further engagement with ex-Prez Trump.

He believes that it wasn’t egregious overreaching. Instead, he argues that indications support his argument that Trump asked heads of Departments what documents they absolutely would not want to see declassified? (This has been mooted elsewhere.)

And then declassified them and secreted them away as insurance over the Deep State.

Thus, Barnes argues that the MAL raid was an aggressive attempt by the Deep State to regain possession of said documents from Trump and keep their wrongful heinous deeds hidden or simply destroyed outright.

The huge size and strategy of going in — hoping to be secretive and hoping that if discovered, it would redound against Trump, smacks of audacious desperation! In other words, incredibly risky.

The big problem I see with this is that if I had a bunch of memos that would blow the lid off the deep state, I'd sure have more than one copy, and I wouldn't keep them all in one place. If the intrepid Agent Starlings of the FBI seize Box 12 with assorted classified material, and that's the big stash, wouldn't Trump be awfully, awfully dumb to have kept just one set of that stuff? I mean, how many copy machines does he have? How many document scanners? How many offsite backups?

I'll even grant that there are probably people in the White House, the DOJ, and the FBI who are dumb enough to think if they get that one copy, they've got the whole thing, but let's face it, Trump isn't that dumb. This whole extended saga, remember, keeps boiling down to a Road Runner cartoon.

A former FBI agent who knows how decisions are made in the Bureau does circle a little closer to the problem:

A search warrant involving a political figure of Trump’s stature would involve a voluminous affidavit, would certainly be controlled at every step by FBI HQ, and would certainly include the electronic signature of the FBI Director. FBI investigations live and breathe in documents called Electronic Communications, or ECs. These documents reside within the secure structure of FBI computer systems. The search warrant process routinely involves copious amounts of documentation via EC that flows not only up and down the FBI management chain, but also horizontally to DOJ attorneys and/or to the Attorney General himself.

. . . It is farcical to assert that the FBI Director, the U.S. Attorney General, and the White House are not hand-in-glove participants throughout the development of an investigation of this import. I have personally been part of investigations, of far less sensitivity, where White House officials observed operational activity. For me, the assertion that Joe Biden didn’t know is laughable.

I think it's possible to get some clue by looking at a principle of signals intellgence: you may not know the code, but the amount of messages alone can tell you something whether you can read them or not. If there's an event of any sort and the quantity of signals spikes just afterward, you've got an idea what the messages are about, and that can tell you something by itself. Let's look at the timeline: the 2022 general election is November 8. The Justice Department and the FBI by policy don't make moves in political cases within 90 days of an election (cough, cough). The August 8 Mar-a-Lago raid was just short of the 90-day deadline.

Beyond that, there's a general expectation that the Republicans will gain control of at least the House in that election, which will give them subpoena power for any number of sensitive investigations like Russiagate and January 6, which could prove highly damaging not just to the administration but to the deep state. There's already talk of abolishing the FBI, for instance.

At this point, it's actually hard for me to imagine what the deep state could potentially gain from either an open-ended fishing expedition to Mar-a-Lago or a targeted document retrieval. The nature of information these days is there's no longer such a thing as a single "smoking gun". If you've got the goods, you've got photocopies and backups, and likely there are backups of copies of backups that nobody even thought of -- and that goes both ways. Secrets are also just as hard to keep hidden.

My bet for now is simply that panic in the deep state has clouded its judgment. The raid was a bad idea, poorly conceived, a high risk operation that actually had no potential corresponding reward.