The Empty Safe Search Warrant

On April 21, 1986, Geraldo Rivera hosted a hugely-publicized, hugely-rated live syndicated event entitled The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults.

Rivera and a crew of workers broke into a secret vault underneath Chicago's Lexington Hotel, where the famous gangster used to run his criminal organization, in hopes of finding a stash of his ill-gotten gains or maybe even dead bodies. Famously, the two-hour special wound up uncovering virtually nothing.

The big news last night was that the FBI executed a search warrant on Donald Trump's office in his home at Mar-a-Lago.

Eric Trump said his father, Donald Trump, had nothing in a safe they claim the FBI breached as part of a raid of the former president's Mar-a-Largo resort on Monday.

The second son of the 45th president said he was with his father in New York City when they found out about the search, and he indicated that it was indeed related to records that Donald Trump brought back with him to his resort in Florida after leaving office.

Now, I don't know any more about how this will all play out than anyone else, but my Spidey Sense is telling me that this empty safe is going to be a much bigger deal than Geraldo's 1986 letdown. The other thing that got my Spidey Sense going, for whatever reason, is the immediate flashback I had to Nixon's October 20, 1973 Saturday Night Massacre. It says a great deal about me that on that particular Saturday night, I had nothing better to do than watch the news. I got the story as it broke, and I followed every twist and turn of the subsequent drama until Nixon's resignation the following August 9.

I got the same sense from the news of the raid this morning that I got that Saturday night almost 50 years ago, that this was something serious, and there would be ramifications. On one hand, for the sake of Attorney General Garland and Director Wray at minimum, there had better be more in those boxes the FBI agents carried out of the office than what was in the empty safe.

Their problem is I don't think there will be, if only because Trump throughout his career, at least up to now, has observed minimal standards of prudence and legality in matters of paying his taxes, records retention, financial reporting, personnel actions, and the like, and so far, attempts to nail him on any number of previous potential scandals have come up short -- if indeed they didn't backfire at Wile E Coyote levels on figures like Michael Avenatti. The man is mortal, but he's at least smart, and if as Aquinas says sin dulls the intellect, it doesn't seem to have dumbed him down as much as it's dumbed down his adversaries.

On the other hand, what strikes me is that even if we leave potential blowback against Wray, Garland, or higher levels in the organization completely aside, this raid strikes me as an awfully dumb move in and of itself. The political campaign season traditionally begins after Labor Day, only weeks away, while it gives Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms plenty of opportinity to plan their campaigns around the raid and gin up outrage among the electorate. It also unifies the Republicans around opposition to Democrats, with Trump on no ballot anywhere to serve as a distraction.

In fact, with the 2024 election more than two years away, the Biden camp is clearly operating on the assumption that Trump is the one to beat, and the earlier they can knock him out, the better. I've been getting a sense that Trump has beeen making some bad policy calls of his own, especially over Ukraine, while DeSantis looks like he's become more in tune with good issues each passing day. As the conventional wisdom goes, a week is a long time in politics, while the administration seems to be trying to game things out two years in advance.

I don't think this is a good plan.