Is The Incoherence The Answer?

I continue to be intrigued by the logical incoherence of any attempt to explain the objectives of the FBI's Mar-a-Lago raid. The prevailing interpretation is that the FBI was trying to find something that Trump wanted to keep hidden. That might be something damaging to Trump himself, like the pee tape or maybe evidence of a January 6 conspiracy, or it might be something Trump knows will damage the deep state that he's withholding until the proper time. The problem with any version of this is that the FBI is assuming that although it's very high value information, Trump is storing it in a low-value repository, a home office safe where any journeyman safecracker can get at it. Trump is smart enough, and he has the resources, not to do this.

It's also worth recognizing that Trump has been the focus of investigations since before his presidential run in 2015. He's been a reality TV star and a generalist celebrity, thus fair journalistic game, for decades. During his first campaign, his presidential term, and afterward, his business career, his finances, his personal history, his social connections, his personality, his sex life, and his golf game have been subject to years of unprecedented scrutiny, including two impeachments and a third congressional investigation. Nobody has yet come up with a smoking gun that could send him to prison or even just discredit him as a public figure. Contrast that with, for instance, Al Gore, a onetime presidential candidate who's subsequently become just a dirty joke.

Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner advanced a new theory last night with Mark Levin, the raid was intended as an event in itself.

Trump, Kushner told Levin, 'drives his enemies so crazy, they always over-pursue him and make mistakes in trying to get him, and that's basically what happened here.'

'But what's happening now, it's the same thing, being done by the same people in the same way, they're leaking to the same sources, they're manufacturing fabulous claims that get debunked shortly thereafter,' he added.

In other words, the raid was intended as a media artifact onto which leaks, unattributed allegations, and conspiracy theories could be attached to make Trump look bad, independent of whether they can be specified and proven in any potential indictment and trial. But at best, this has turned out to be a half-baked idea that's backfired, and it's opened the possibility (just as wacky) that Trump is the one who has the smoking gun on the deep state. Well, Jared Kushner is a smart guy.

But also, as I noted yesterday, on one hand, the raid is part of an operation being run by Peter Strzok's old counterintelligence unit, with many of his former colleagues. Beyond that, as of late last night, we learn that the FBI agent who ran the Whitmer kidnapping plot entrapment from Detroit was moved up to the FBI's Washington field office, and it turns out he's now in charge of the whole investigation of which the raid is a part:

The Washington, D.C., FBI field office that raided former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and is investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach is led by Steven D'Antuono, who ran the bureau's Detroit field office when, trial testimony alleges, it instigated, encouraged and facilitated what the government charges was a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

. . . The plot was an "FBI-inspired, organized, and executed scheme to 'kidnap' and 'assassinate' Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the 2020 presidential election," according to reporter Julie Kelly, who has been covering the trial for American Greatness.

Two of the men charged in the plot were acquitted in April on the grounds that they had been entrapped by the FBI, and the jury could not reach a verdict for Fox and Croft, Kelly told "War Room" TV show host Steve Bannon on Tuesday.

While the DOJ decided to retry Fox and Croft, Kelly said that the department's "timing could not be worse," as the credibility of both the DOJ and FBI is "imploding."

Although two of the former alleged conspirators were acquitted on the basis that the jury concluded they'd been entrapped by the FBI, the retrial is bringing out the same uncertainties in the cases of the others:

FBI informants have been accused of improperly coordinating with the men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, according to lawyers seeking to scrutinize the agency’s conduct in its investigation.

Lawyers for Barry Croft Jr., one of the alleged ringleaders of the kidnapping plot, argue that FBI informants Jenny Plunk and Steve Robeson had an unusual relationship with the defendant that included smoking marijuana with him. . .

FBI special agent Christopher Long testified that the shared room was meant to be a cost-reducing tactic, arguing that neither Croft nor Plunk had much money at the time, according to the Detroit Free Press. However, he acknowledged that he had never monitored a case in which sources of the opposite gender stayed in the same room during his time as an agent.

It's hard to get around a feeling that this particular unit of the FBI has become unhinged, especially when the mastermind of the comical Whitmer kidnap investigation was promoted to take down Trump. I think this could go some way to explain the logical inconsistencies behind media theories of the case. For instance:

A cache of Russiagate documents President Donald Trump wanted released during his final days in office contained information about a pair of former leading FBI officials infamous for their private exchanges disparaging Trump, according to a new report.

Never-before-seen text messages between ex-FBI special agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, as well as unreleased information about the FBI's investigative steps, were part of this binder of Crossfire Hurricane investigation materials, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

Wait a moment. Strzok and Page at this stage are an old dirty joke, relegated to the same archive as Al Gore and Monica Lewinsky. For Trump to be secreting files of their unreleased text mesages, no matter what they covered, would be a waste of time. This guy understands the US public in the same uncanny way Queen Victoria understood the UK, and the FBI thinks he's about to blow the whistle again on Strzok and Page?? Not only that, but Strzok and Page do no good for the FBI's reputation -- so the New York Times thinks it should bring them up now?

Or how about this?

Did the FBI raid Mar-a-Lago to retrieve letters to Trump from Korean leader Kim Jong-un? Were they looking for the letter written to Trump by Barack Obama and left inside the Resolute desk at the end of Obama’s time in the White House? According to reporting, both of those items are at the top of the list of documents the National Archive wants from Donald Trump.

OK, but if the National Archives wants them as the story says, they're covered by the Presidential Records Act, which isn't a criminal statute, and it can't be enforced with a search warrant. The FBI wouldn't be involved, unless there's extreme misconduct here, and that would be the actual story, not some rinky-dink letters. This is fairly simple stuff that even a bright middle school student should be able to understand, although my position all along has been that the best reporters at any outlet are only at the bright middle-school level. The writer who did this story isn't even at that level.

The bottom line is that the circumstances of the Mar-a-Lago raid as they've come out simply defy attempts at logical explanation. That may be the best route to understanding it.