Mar-a-Lago: The Plot Doesn't Thicken, It Congeals

By the way, the Watergate burglary took place 50 years ago this past June. I was studying Milton's prose in graduate school at the time, and I never believed anyone could get hooked on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. How wrong I was. Now I'm starting to get a real sense of deja vu.

Sorting through this morning's news and commentary, I think there are three important items. The first, and likely most consequential, is Judicial Watch's motion to unseal the Mar-a-Lago search warrant:

The public has an urgent and substantial interest in understanding the predicate for the execution of the unprecedented search warrant of the private residence of a former president and likely future political opponent. . . . [N]o official explanation or information has been released about the search. As of the filing of this motion, the public record consists solely of speculation and inuendo. In short, the historical presumption of access to warrant materials vastly outweighs any interest the government may have in keeping the materials under seal.

. . . Given the political context, and the highly unusual action of executing a search warrant at the residence of a former President and likely future political opponent, it is essential that the public understands as soon as possible the basis for the government’s action. Any government interest in securing the identities of witnesses and confidential sources, if any, may be addressed by appropriate redactions from the search warrant affidavit.

Judge Rinehart has given the Justice Department until close of business Monday to reply.

The second item from yesterday is a Newsweek story that relies on two anonymous Deep State sources:

FBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Justice Department official who is a 30-year veteran of the FBI.

The effort to keep the raid low-key failed: instead, it prompted a furious response from GOP leaders and Trump supporters. "What a spectacular backfire," says the Justice official.

"I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action," the official says. "They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite."

Even if the story is woven from the self-serving accounts of two different Deep Throats, it's remarkably self-contradictory. The tone is basically, "Heh-heh, what did you expect from a bunch of bureaucrats? Don't make too much of it!" but it suddenly pivots to firestorms:

"They were seeking to avoid any media circus," says the second source, a senior intelligence official who was briefed on the investigation and the operation. "So even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout."

Throughout the account, it's worthwhile to keep in mind that the two sources are speaking to a sympathetic outlet, and they're doing what they think they must to further their own personal interests and the interests of their agencies. The Mar-a-Lago search warrant, plus all the supporting material, continues to be under seal until the courts rule otherwise. According to Trump's lawyers, they were eventually allowed to glimpse the warrant, but were not given a copy. It sounds to me as though the Newsweek Deep Throats, on the other hand, have a pretty good idea of what's in it but are doing what they can to spin things:

According to the Justice Department source, the [National] Archives [believed] that the former White House was stonewalling and continued to possess unauthorized material. Earlier this year, they asked the Justice Department to investigate.

In late April, the source says, a federal grand jury began deliberating whether there was a violation of the Presidential Records Act or whether President Trump unlawfully possessed national security information. Through the grand jury process, the National Archives provided federal prosecutors with copies of the documents received from former President Trump in January 2022. The grand jury concluded that there had been a violation of the law, according to the Justice Department source.

In the past week, the prosecutor in the case and local Assistant U.S. Attorney went to Florida magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in West Palm Beach to seek approval for the search of Donald Trump's private residence. The affidavit to obtain the search warrant, the intelligence source says, contained abundant and persuasive detail that Trump continued to possess the relevant records in violation of federal law, and that investigators had sufficient information to prove that those records were located at Mar-a-Lago—including the detail that they were contained in a specific safe in a specific room.

But again, all that abundant and persuasive detail is under seal. Trust us! But the next item suggests there's reason to doubt this quasi-official spin. It's a story at Just the News, Questions grow about Trump raid after revelation of grand jury subpoena, extensive cooperation

Two months before his Florida home was raided by the FBI, former President Donald Trump secretly received a grand jury subpoena for classified documents belonging to the National Archives, and voluntarily cooperated by turning over responsive evidence, surrendering security surveillance footage and allowing federal agents and a senior Justice Department lawyer to tour his private storage locker, according to a half dozen people familiar with the incident.

. . . The subpoena requested any remaining documents Trump possessed with any classification markings, even if they involved photos of foreign leaders, correspondence or mementos from his presidency.

. . . [T]he president's lawyers complied and allowed the search by the FBI before the entourage left cordially. Five days later, DOJ officials sent a letter to Trump's lawyers asking them to secure the storage locker with more than the lock they had seen. The Secret Service installed a more robust security lock to comply.

. . . The disclosure Wednesday to Just the News raised immediate new questions in legal and congressional circles about the necessity for the subsequent raid, including whether the judge who approved the warrant new [sic] of the earlier cooperation.

“The more we learn, the more confusing this gets,” George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley told Fox News program Hannity. “….Did they relay this history to the magistrate? That, according to these sources, that the president had cooperated.

”I mean, the idea that he was subject to a subpoena, complied with a subpoena, didn't challenge it, voluntarily showed the storage room to the agents, followed their advice, secured it to meet their demands. All of that is hardly a basis for saying now we need to send in 40 FBI agents on a on a raid,” he added. “I mean, if the subpoena worked the first time, then presumably a second subpoena would work the second time if there were remaining documents.”

So at the moment we're looking at two starkly conflicting narratives, one from anonymous sources within the Deep State that Trump was stonewalling attempts to identify and retrieve important classified documents that he'd removed from the White House without authority, the other that these were routine and largely personal materials that had been hastily packed into boxes willy-nilly by the Government Services Administration in the process of moving the former president out -- and given his understanding of the circumstances, Trump and his attorneys had been fully cooperating with efforts to sort through these items.

If the Trump version is true, there would have been no reason for a search warrant. The idea that secrecy would be needed to keep Trump from destroying evidence is absurd: Trump wasn't living at Mar-a-Lago, as he was in Bedminster, NJ for the summer, which the Deep State sources say the gvernment knew -- their intent was to do the raid quietly with Trump out of the way. Indeed, if the evidence would be scattered among 15 boxes of random mementos, in a locked facility covered by surveillance video, it's hard to imagine a scenario where a secret frenzied last-minute document shred could even be possible.

I don't think this can be a simple bureaucratic snafu any more than Watergate was a third-rate burglary attempt. But as with Watergate, the tidbits will keep coming.