Here's What I Don't Understand About Never Trump

It's hard to imagine anyone in modern history, and by that I mean back to maybe 1517, who's been investigated as much as Donald Trump. The man is human, certainly not blameless, but so far, despite multiple congressional investigations, two impeachments, and some number of grand jury proceedings, he remains unindicted and unremoved from office. If critics claim he's a narcissist, it nevertheless remains that narcissism is not against the law. Instead, as president, he presided over prosperity and kept us out of wars.

I would enjoy hearing of some historical figure who's been investigated nearly as much, if not more. As I reflect on this, it occurs to me that regimes are normally much more efficient at disposing of those whom they find inconvenient, which may say something about the capabilities of Trump's enemies, and that may lead me to my eventual point here. The reaction of never Trumpers to the Mar-a-Lago raid may actually be illustrative of the overall problem.

Let's take a piece by Allahpundit at the Hot Air blog. I would characterize Allahpundit as something of a pertpetual Nervous Nellie, or maybe even a Hysterical Henrietta, on just about any topic -- over the course of COVID, he's repeatedly warned of progressively more lethal new surges, for instance. Yesterday, he asked, Why didn't Trump give the documents back when the Archives first asked for them last year?

The latest scoop comes from WaPo, which obtained an email sent by the top lawyer at the National Archives to Trump’s team in *May 2021* requesting the return of two dozen boxes of documents. According to that email, Trump’s own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, had designated the material in the boxes as government property that properly belonged to the Archives in the final days of Trump’s presidency. Even his own lawyers concluded that he had no right to retain the papers, in other words. And the Archives had been nagging him for fully 15 months to please just hand them over before the FBI showed up at Mar-a-Lago.

. . . Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy is watching this play out with growing unease. MAGA media has been harping on the fact that Steidel Wall, in her letter to Trump’s lawyers in May, acknowledged that the White House has been involved in this process. But the White House had no choice in that, McCarthy notes: Under federal law, once a former president asserts executive privilege over documents, the Archives *must* consult with the current president to see if he wants to honor the privilege claim of his predecessor. In this case, Biden deferred to Steidel Wall to make the decision, evidently not wanting to insert himself into the matter. It was Trump who dragged Biden into this by asserting privilege, says McCarthy.

All well and good, so far. But also, what we hear is that disputes between ex-presidents and the National Archives over who owns what are routine, and the Clintons, for instance, left not just with boxes of memorabilia but with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of furniture. Now, if I were an ex-president, I might well decide that disputing who owns the picture of me shaking hands with the Vice Premier of Elbonia isn't worth my time, and I'd tell the movers just to ship it all back. On the other hand, I'm not an ex-president, and I'll grant that to run for that office takes a very different makeup from mine. Trump didn't get rich by deciding some things didn't matter, and notwithstanding, disputing ownership of cocktail napkins with the National Archives, or even procrastinating an answer to their letters, is not an indictable offense.

Here's where things get wonky. Allahpundit quotes fellow never-Trumper Andrew McCarthy:

For those of us who remain skeptical about whether the drastic measure of a search warrant was really necessary (especially given the FBI and DOJ’s evident lack of urgency in the months after Trump’s surrender of the 15 boxes in January 2022), these revelations require grappling with a hard question: Given that the former president was not responsibly securing the government’s most closely held intelligence, that he was trying to prevent the FBI from examining what he’d returned, that his lawyers were either misinformed about or lying about the classified information still retained at Mar-a-Lago, and that even the issuance of a grand-jury subpoena (with potential criminal penalties for noncompliance) had not succeeded in getting Trump to hand over the remaining classified information, what option short of a search warrant would have sufficed?

This introduces the separate question of classified documents into what McCarthy is stirring into a murky gumbo. The Presidential Records Act, under which the Archives had been pursuing certain documents, is not a criminal statute, and there are actually no penalties specified for its violation. Thus I can tell the Archives with impunity to pound sand over the picture of me shaking hands with the Vice Premier of Elbonia. And yes indeed, if I had been so careless with some top-secret estimate of Chinese nukes as to give it to the grand-niece of a major donor who had no reason to see it, I could be held responsible criminally, but that's a separate issue.

The story as both Allahpundit and McCarthy tell it is that the dispute with the Archives had been going on at the cocktail-napkin level for more than a year, since May 2021. In April 2022, the Archives asserted that there had been classified materials in boxes of cocktail napkin level stuff that Trump returned that January.

The problem continues to be severalfold. One is that the president has ultimate authority to declassify documents. The second is that since George Dubya, presidents have been authorized to remove classified documents to the White House residence area from official office premises for simple convenience. The third is that even if classified documents were found in the residence area, where they were authorized, and hurriedly thrown at random into boxes by housekeeping staff as part of the effort to move the Trumps out, there would have been no criminal intent by Trump to disclose them.

It's hard to avoid thinking a search warrant, with its implication of a grand jury investigation and an impending indictment for espionage, would be an overreaction to the situation. McCarthy himself seems to recognize this at some level in a post at National Review's The Corner:

[T]he government usually waits until the end of the investigation to seek search warrants. The Justice Department cannot properly get a search warrant unless it has probable cause that crimes were committed. If it has such probable cause, that almost always means it has a basis to make arrests — for which probable cause that a crime has been committed is also the standard. In a normal case — and there’s nothing normal about the Mar-a-Lago probe — arrest and search warrants are executed at the end, frequently based on the same probable-cause affidavit.

. . . I find the most interesting part of [Judge Reinhart's order to release the redacted affadavit] the revelation that the Justice Department argued that disclosure would reveal, and thus cause unfair prejudice to, uncharged parties. Of course, the major uncharged party here is former president Donald Trump.

. . . On the other hand, maybe the Justice Department said this because the objective here is not to charge the former president with a crime.

. . . Attorney General Merrick Garland knows this. My belief is that what the DOJ, the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the National Archives and Records Administration wanted was to get the documents back and ensure that highly classified information is returned to its proper secure repositories. I don’t think they’re hot to make a criminal case out of this.

Oh, so that's it. The FBI, as McCarthy himself explains, came roaring in with a search warrant, which is the thing they do when indictment and arrest are normally either simultaneous with the raid or very soon to come, but they didn't want to make a big deal out of it? Was there really no way to explain to Trump that the housekeepers had inadvertently thrown Top Secret docs in with the cocktail napkins on the morning of January 20, and they just want to get this straightened out? Yeah, Pete Strzok's old colleagues will be happy to schedule a non-adversarial session to get this all cleared up, just never you mind.

The whole history of Trump's problems with the deep state, starting with the FBI's entrapment of Gen Flynn during his first days in the White House, suggests that would never fly. I can't imagine that McCarthy even believes his whole story here. Does he really think the Justice Department gets search warrants as just a never-mind? Remember that one way the FBI has historically obtained false confessions is to say "just sign here, this is routine, nothing important." The FBI tried to get Richard Jewell to sign a confession by telling him he was taking part in a training film about bomb detection. Both Allahpundit and McCarthy say there's something wrong with Trump if he doesn't just roll over for this kind of hanky-pank.

And if, as McCarthy says, they weren't going to indict Trump, that's silly, er, who were they going to indict? The housekeeper who packed the boxes? Jeffrey Epstein?

The silver lining is that even as McCarthy paints the most favorable picture he can of the government's motives, it goes again to my first point, that at least the government we have isn't very capable at getting rid of people it finds inconvenient. And Allahpundit and McCarthy should have a tenth of Trump's smarts. There's something basically unserious about this whole post-Trump never-Trump effort.

Why Did Big Doc Resign?

Let's examine some data points. Dr Fauci's sidekick, Dr Deborah Birx, was able to retire on generous terms after she was caught violating COVID protocols. (Her job in any case, of course, was simply to stand next to Big Doc and nod while he spoke):

A top public health official on the White House coronavirus task force has said she will retire after it emerged she hosted a holiday gathering.

Dr Deborah Birx, who is 64, cited the criticism she had faced for a family get-together over Thanksgiving in Delaware in her decision to step aside.

. . . Late on Tuesday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted President Donald Trump's good wishes, saying he "has great respect for Dr Birx and likes her very much. We wish her well".

In an interview with US news network Newsy aired on Tuesday, a masked Dr Birx did not specify when she would stand down, but said she would help the incoming Biden administration and "and then I will retire".

So basically, she got to say whoops, my bad, I'll retire, but she was alllowed to do it on her own vague schedule, at age 65, with full benefits and with nice words from the president. A year later, Big Doc's boss, NIH Director Francis Collins, retired on the same terms:

After spending more than 12 years as director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins is retiring this weekend. But he's no less worried about the public health agency's latest pandemic curveball.

As the omicron variant threatens record-breaking rates of infections in the U.S., Collins departs with a warning. If Americans don't take COVID-19 seriously, the country could see 1 million daily infections, he said.

In fact, after his retirement, he was treated quite well, with a new sinecure:

That was quick. Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., after exiting the top perch at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the last weeks of 2021, is back in the upper echelons of U.S. scientific leadership as President Joe Biden's science adviser.

He had a unique ability to sidestep criticism while shutting down COVID dissent within the public health establishment:

In addition to leaving the top post at NIAID, he will also step down as chief of NIAID’s immunoregulation lab and leave his post as Biden’s adviser. This week, emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed what I see as worrisome communication between Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that Covid-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others.

At the time, Americans would have benefited from a broad debate among scientists about the available policy options for controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, and perhaps a bit of compromise. The emails tell us why that isn’t what we got.

One partiicular e-mail from Collins to Fauci, which Collins acknowledged was authentic, effectively ordered Fauci to engineer a "quick and devastating published takedown" of the Great Barrington Declaration. Collins's announcement of his retirement, made in October 2021, predated release of that and other e-mails in December, but I suspect Collins, and more importantly the lizard people, fully understood the direction things were heading and engineered a quiet departure.

Indeed, the circumstances suggest a cozy arrangement; Collins, born in 1950, was 71 at the time he retired and may be assumed to have enjoyed, like Big Doc himself, a de facto lifetime appointment. Instead, he was allowed to retire without controversy before the smoking gun was released, while weeks later, he quietly stepped into a White House sinecure.

Contrast that with the end of Fauci's NIH career:

Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert who rocketed to unexpected fame during the pandemic, will step down at the end of the year.

Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, will wrap up a storied career in which he advised seven presidents. Instead of retiring, he’s leaving his government posts to “pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci, 81, said in a statement released Monday by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a branch of the National Institutes of Health.

. . . In addition to leaving the top post at NIAID, he will also step down as chief of NIAID’s immunoregulation lab and leave his post as Biden’s adviser.

But only a month ago, this was not the expected outcome:

Fauci, currently serving as Biden’s chief medical adviser, will retire before the end of January 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because details around the retirement plans haven’t been disclosed.

. . . Earlier Monday, Politico reported in a wide-ranging interview that Fauci didn’t expect to remain in government past Biden’s first term in office.

What changed? Last month, he'd retire, maybe in a couple of years or so. A month later, he's resigned as of date certain and pointedly is not retiring. No White House sinecure awaits.

My money is he got a call from Ron Klain or some equivalent figure telling him not all that nicely that the president had decided he should resign, with the implication that otherwise he'd be fired. I think we can pretty safely assume this was a different deal from the ones Drs Birx and Collins were given.

I would also guess that at some point in the not too distant future, we'll be learning more. One motive would likely be the desire of Democrats to airbrush COVID and lockdowns, masks, asnd vaxxing from history as quicky as possible in the runup to November.

The Watergate Pattern Again

I've noted before that once the Watergate scandal got well under way, there was a regular pattern whereby Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would make some assertion that the White House wasn't involved in any sort of coverup, only to have documents surface in subsequent days that showed the opposite was true. Ziegler then became famous for declaring his previous statements "inoperative".

We seem to be returning to the days of inoperative statements.

Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump's estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president's claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump's Florida home.

. . . The machinations are summarized in several memos and emails exchanged between the various agencies in spring 2022, months before the FBI took the added unprecedented step of raiding Trump's Florida compound with a court-issued search warrant.

The most complete summary was contained in a lengthy letter dated May 10 that acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall sent Trump's lawyers summarizing the White House's involvement.

. . . The memos provide the most definitive evidence to date of the current White House's effort to facilitate a criminal probe of the man Joe Biden beat in the 2020 election and may face again as a challenger in 2024. That involvement included eliminating one of the legal defenses Trump might use to fight the FBI over access to his documents.

The official version of the White House's involvement in the raid remains press secretary Jean-Pierre's statement on August 9:

The White House was not briefed or given advance notice about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday.

“The president was not briefed, was not aware of it, no. No one at the White House was given a heads-up,” Jean-Pierre said.

This is pretty clearly weasel-worded, and it's disingenuous insofar as it omits any specific denial that the White House planned the action, irrespective of its specific date and time. The latest document reveal indicates that as of May, there had been intense planning, with close White House involvement, for the Justice Department and the FBI to seize the remaining disputed documents, although the pretextual reason was the National Archives request, not any security violation.

The focus of this effort was to reclaim a dozen or so boxes of Trump White House records and memorabilia, apparently hurriedly packed at random by housekeepers in the days leading up to January 20, 2021, and demanded by the National Archives. Indeed, as late as June 2022, after the May letter, Trump had been cooperating with the Archives.

Here's the puzzle. Trump did in fact deliver an earlier tranche of such documents to the Archives this past January. But the Archives claimed after the January delivery that the randomly packed boxes contained classified documents, of which little else has been said publicly. The Presidential Records Act, however, is not a criminal statute. so some criminal violation must be found to justify a search warrant and an FBI raid.

However, it doesn't appear that the existence of classified documents in the January tranche was sufficient grounds for any charge against Trump, even though the Justice Department presumably already had them. But as far as we can tell pending unsealing the affadavit for the warrant, those documents became grounds for the August raid to get additional documents -- although as has been pointed out many times, there seems to have been little urgency in the timing of this whole enterprise.

This leads in turn to the conclusion, hard to avoid, that the raid was never more than a fishing expedition to see what else Trump might have. But there you've got the problem that however many boxes of random household souvenirs, letters, photos, or paperwork there may have been or still remain at Mar-a-Lago, they were basically low-priority detritus left around by the departing Trumps and hastily gathered up by the White House housekeeping staff in the waning hours of the administration.

We must assume that by January 20, 2021, anything of real importance had already been gathered up and taken away by Trump's own retainers and his attorneys, if indeed it had ever been in the White House (if I were smart enough to be president, would I trust anyone there very far at all?). Consider also that Trump from the time of his 2016 election had been suspicious that the Trump Tower was not secure and had moved his transition activities to his Bedminister, NJ facility. Thus I question whether anything Biden would want to find among Trump documents has ever even been in an obvious place if it were that important. In other words, if it was any kind of smoking gun, good or bad for Trump, why would he ever even take it to the White House, where official records can be made of it and inadvertent eyes can see it? He had, and has, too many other options for his personal and business security.

At this point, we may also assume that the correspondence from the White House to Trump's attorneys cited here was provided to the media by Trump's attorneys -- and further, that letter is just a public document, nothing confidential about it. My guess is that whatever Trump has, if it isn't public, it's far better protected than cocktail napkins and letters from Kim in a bunch of storage boxes, and Trump will release it on a schedule that suits him. I'm still trying to see how there's any up side for Biden in all this.

COVID Goes Away, Trump Comes Back, Part Deux

The biggest story yesterday without a doubt was Dr Fauci's announcement of his resignations from his interlocking positions within the deep state, although he stressed this wasn't "retirement".

Fauci is currently the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden.

“I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci revealed in a statement.

Fauci’s decision significantly moves up the timeline of his retirement, as he said in July he would resign at the end of Biden’s first term.

Just two Saturdays ago, I noted that Dr Fauci had been booed while throwing out the first pitch at a Seattle Mariners game. Did this have anything to do with his decision? I wouldn't rule it out, but too much else has been happening. For instance, his former sidekick Dr Birx is starting to adopt the time-tested Albert Speer strategy for rehabilitating her public image, essentially to say she really wasn't 100% on board with the genocidal thugs who were running the show:

Former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should prioritize transparency in reforming the agency after the pandemic.

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, Dr. Birx said that the CDC should focus on sharing its data with the American people in a way they can understand and work with the private sector to better collect information.

. . . “[I]n March of 2020, all of our data that I used to warn Americans of who was at risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and death came from our European colleagues,” she said. “That in itself should be an indictment of our system.”

Wait a moment. The way I remember things, in February of 2020, Fauci was telling us not to wear masks and to go on a cruise. By March, it had changed to the scary expanding red circles on the evening news based on the Imperial College London models, which were models, not data. And Dr Birx at the time was endorsing every scary red circle. "Transparancy" is hardly the cure, the cure is not telling lies to incite panic, but then, she'd have to accept responsibility with Fauci. She goes on,

“Secondly, reporting was coming in extraordinarily slow from hospitals through a system that CDC had created. And I know this created controversy, but for three months, I asked the CDC to fix its system and develop a partnership with clinics and hospitals, and laboratories, and they wouldn’t. And so that’s why I asked all the hospitals to start reporting, and they did. And so I think sometimes we hold ourselves back.”

Translation: "We weren't using data at all, we were just passing on the scary ICL red circles, which led to the predictions of mass graves in public parks and sending hospital ships to New York and LA, which had to sail away unused a couple months later. This destroyed our credibility from the start, but I sorta thought we shouldn't do this." Oh, right. Except she herself had to retire in a hurry once she blew her own credibility by having a family Thanksgiving when she'd told the public not to.

UPDATE: On Fox last night, Dr Fauci first denied he ever locked anything down, but if he did, it was with Dr Birx's agreement. Apparently he's trying to hitchhike on her attempts to rehabilitate herself.

In the wake of his announcement, Dr Fauci isn't even showing Dr Birx's level of insight:

Outgoing National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” that people on the right who were distorting reality to believe that the January 6 Capitol riot didn’t happen were also creating an environment where proper public health responses to pandemics are being impeded.

Well, it wasn't that Dr Birx and I blew our credibility, it was just that the public wouldn't believe us. OK, but whatever the reason, the guy is out, more than two years earlier than he'd promised. That's what I call science. But it looks like even Dr Fauci couldn't ignore a growing informed consensus that the public health establishment, led by Drs Fauci and Birx, couldn't have had things more wrong over a two-year period:

Critics argue that the CDC, the feds broadly and the U.S. public health establishment have erred repeatedly in their assertions related to COVID, ignoring global research clarifying the risk profile of the virus, the tradeoffs of masking, the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and the economic, social and educational toll of strict mitigation measures.

. . . The agency issued its ultimate walk-back in revised COVID guidance this month, removing distinctions between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups — the only credible legal basis for vaccine mandates — and recognizing that natural immunity by itself confers protection, as White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci's own scientists have documented.

It's hard to avoid thinking there's been a long con going on for more than two years, and whatever the truth or falsity of theories the 2020 election was stolen, the version that Trump was some sort of bumpkin who ignored the sage counsel of Drs Birx and Fauci is dead, dead, dead. Contra Dr Fauci, this goes some way to rehabilitate Trump as a leader with fortitude and foresight, and it shores up the metaphorical meaning of a stolen election and January 6, if not necessarily the factual truth. But it's the metaphor that tells the story, not the footnotes.

So yet again, I don't think it's a coincidence that COVID is going away as Trump returns to the public sphere. By the way, you may not have noticed, but he's seized control of the Republican Party in the process, something he didn't have while in office:

Former President Donald Trump blasted Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as a “broken down hack” just days after the Senate Minority Leader questioned whether the GOP would be able to flip the chamber in November’s midterm elections.

“Why do Republicans Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate,” Trump said on his Truth Social media site late Saturday.

. . . McConnell did not name particular candidates, but a group of Trump-endorsed Senate candidates are struggling in the polls.

Whatever disagreements Trump had with McConnell as president, he kept them relatively quiet. Now McConnell is a broken-down hack, on a par with Crooked Hillary and Low Energy Jeb. Trump is on familiar terrritory, while McConnell, like Hillary and Jeb before him, is not. Out of office, he got rid of Liz Cheney. McConnell is fully aware of this.

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.

The Deep Throats Explain It All

As I've noted, in the two weeks since the Mar-a-Lago raid, there's been a chorus of Deep Throats who allegedly have knowledge of the FBI's inner workings feeding backgound info to overcredulous news writers. It's worth tabulating what they've been saying, if only to see if it might fall together into some kind of working hypothesis, although there's a logical problem with any theory that says the search was intended to retrieve a particular document or artifact.

Let's start with the analysis of Peter Strzok himself, who surfaced last week to give his own take:

Please oh please keep asking how you can turn down the temperature in the country.

And why does he have two passports?

The Russian passport, of course, is kept in a vault at Yasenevo and only swapped out at third country meets, so it can't be that one. pic.twitter.com/Hbk8iL39Ax

— Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) August 15, 2022

Clearly Strzok still believes there's a Putin connection, quite possibly via the pee tapes. This at least suggests there's a continuing mindset among people who used to be at a high level in the FBI, if they aren't there now. But it appears that Strzok's former colleagues in the counterintelligence section are still on that case, whether he's with them or not. Via Real Clear Investigations,

The FBI's nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president's Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington – not Miami, as has been widely reported – according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau's counterintelligence division led the 2016-2017 Russia "collusion" investigation of Trump, codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane."

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau's disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team – Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten – has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden's son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian "disinformation," an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

And yet more officials with knowledge of lots of stuff weigh in:

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last Monday was specifically intended to recover Donald Trump's personal "stash" of hidden documents, two high-level U.S. intelligence officials tell Newsweek.

To justify the unprecedented raid on a former president's residence and protect the source who revealed the existence of Trump's private hoard, agents went into Trump's residence on the pretext that they were seeking all government documents, says one official who has been involved in the investigation. But the true target was this private stash, which Justice Department officials feared Donald Trump might weaponize.

"They collected everything that rightfully belonged to the U.S. government but the true target was these documents that Trump had been collecting since early in his administration," says the source, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

Well, it's unnamed guys talking to Newsweek, which gives you an idea of its reliability. But running through all these accounts is the idea that whatever the subject of the search warrant, it was pretextual, and the FBI was after something else. It was either the smoking gun that will send Trump to the supermax (call it the pee tape theory), or it's the smoking gun that will blow the lid off the deep state (call it the Jason Bourne theory). These might both be combined as a "secret stash" theory, it's either something that will vindicate Trump or send him to the slammer.

There's a logical problem either way. Let's grant it's the pee tape, with an accompanying certificate of authenticity signed by Vladimir Putin himself. Why on earth would Trump keep this around? And not just keep it around, but keep it in the Mar-a-Lago home office safe? Which home office safe was apparently the first place the FBI looked? Just for starters, there are numerous Trump properties that aren't on US soil, and there have got to be storage facilities more secure than a mundane office safe. Wouldn't it at least be in Trump's interest to complicate any effort to get that stuff either via a search warrant, or even via multiple intelligence agencies, warrant or no?

On the other hand, let's go with the Jason Bourne theory, it's the one document or set of documents that'll send not just Christopher Wray, not Just Merrick Garland, but Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, George Dubya, and Hillary herself to the supermax. I mean, they'll have to build a new wing in Colorado just to handle the wave of new tenants. If this is so hot, again, why would Trump keep it in the first place the FBI looked? And remember, this smoking-gun stash is an extremely valuable item to have, incalculable value. Corporations keep information that's that important -- say, the secret formula for Coca-Cola -- in highly secure environments with multiple backups just as secure.

But Trump, a corporate CEO who must have at least some familiarity with the value of information and how to protect it, leaves it in an office safe? Without a backup? And the FBI thinks if it gets this stash, all it needs to do is spirit it away and shred it?

This leads to the next question. Let's grant that Deep Throat N, the one who spoke to Newsweek, is legit, Newsweek has vetted him, knows who he is, and has reason to think he's giving the straight stuff. To this, my answer is HUH?? This is a high level guy at the FBI, the DOJ, or the CIA, and he believes all the FBI needed to do was get a warrant, send Strzok's replacement in with a safecracker, steal the memo back even if it wasn't in the warrant, and everything's copacetic?

Or let's say Deep Throat N is smarter than that, he knows the FBI is living in a dream world, and he's talking to Newsweek to cover his butt before it all hits the fan. All that does is move the whole problem just one degree of separation farther away, you're still left with the issue that we aren't even in The Bourne Identity, we're just in a rerun of Get Smart. The end game is still that Wray and Garland head for the supermax, at least figuratively just down the hall from Ted Kaczynski -- the outcome is just delayed by a few extra months.

I doubt if any actual outcome will be that apocalyptic. But notice that the consensus of the deep throats, and presumably the newsies who listen to them, is that the FBI raid was pretextual, and the dozen boxes of cocktail napkins, memos, and souvenirs the FBI carried off had nothing to do with the actual target of the search, which wasn't listed on the search warrant. That actually has a certain ring of truth, and it if is, that problem is big enough.

Is Trump A Genius, Or Is Biden Just Really Dumb?

Consider developments for Trump in the less than two weeks since the Mar-a-Lago raid. The polls:

The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump‘s estate bolstered his support among GOP primary voters and widened his lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to a new poll.

The Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 57% of primary voters would back Mr. Trump if he ran and the primary were held now, a 4-point jump from the 53% who backed the ex-president in a mid-July poll.

Mr. DeSantis, meanwhile, saw his support slide from 23% to 17%, meaning Mr. Trump saw a 10-point boost over his nearest rival after agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate.

The never-Trump Allahpundit at Hot Air senses Maybe the "DeSantasy" really is over:

I was, am, and will remain bullish that DeSantis still stands a chance at the 2024 nomination, at least as long as you-know-who isn’t indicted. In the bizarro world of modern-day Republican morality, criminal charges against Trump really would seal the primaries for him.

. . . After all, it was a poll of New Hampshire in June that set the commentariat on fire when it showed DeSantis leading Trump in a hypothetical primary there, 39/37. That survey was conducted by UNH whereas today’s data comes from St. Anselm, so we can’t say definitively based on the two that there’s now been a shift.

. . . From DeSantis +2 to Trump +21. Maybe the “rally ’round the document thief” effect following the search of Mar-a-Lago really has ended the 2024 “DeSantasy,” as one Trump advisor put it.

Let's look at what's happened here. DeSantis has been doing a workmanlike job, running in Florida on a potentially very attractive national platform of anti-woke, anti-COVID overreach, pro-prosperity. It's been so effective that Gavin Newsom ran ads against him. The conventional wisdom would say he's proving himself a sensible guy, as opposed to the unpredictable, narcissistic nut job Trump.

But right now, Trump has surged back into full stature as a national figure based on one issue, Trump himself. Last night he posted,

My rights, together with the rights of all Americans, have been violated at a level rarely seen before in our Country. Remember, they even spied on my campaign. The greatest Witch Hunt in USA history has been going on for six years, with no consequences to the scammers. It should not be allowed to continue!

Earlier,

When will people realize that the atrocities being perpetrated by the FBI and DOJ having to do with the Raid and Break In of my home, Mar-a-Lago, or after years of other atrocities and unthinkable violations of freedom and the law, this has been going on for years, from the moment I came down the golden escalators in Trump Tower, right up until the present. At some point you have to look at what took place in the past to determine what is going on in the present. . .

At this point, you can't argue with success. DeSantis's handlers have paused their presidential fundraising in light of Trump's complete possession of the floor. It's also at least conventional wisdom that the focus on Trump after the Mar-a-Lago raid contributed to Liz Cheney's margin of defeat in her Wyoming primary. But that was just a bellwether:

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney’s GOP primary defeat this week did more than just end her family’s dominance in U.S. politics dating back to her father’s role as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in 1974.

It also marked the coming end of a long stretch of at least 75 years of somebody from one of America’s modern political dynasties serving in federal elected or appointed office.

Since 1947, when then-Sen. John F. Kennedy came to Washington, there has been either a Kennedy, a Bush, a Cheney, or a Clinton in office.

The one name the never-Trump Examiner doesdn't mention until several paragraphs later is Donald Trump, but it's worth stressing that the Kennedy run ended on its own before Trump's time, but Trump himself ended the political careers of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, and opposition to Trump ended Liz Cheney's career as a Republican. The Examiner took the long way around to say Trump has shaped the modern political landscape. In an alternate universe, after all, you could have sold the idea that Liz Cheney was the sensible, moderate centrist, and likely this is the bubble the remaining Bushies inhabit.

Look no farther than Leader McConnell's assessment of Republican chances to take the Senate this fall:

The Kentucky Republican Senator had said on Thursday, “I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate. Senate races are just different. They’re statewide. Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”

That's a thinly veiled swipe at Trump and a backhanded acknowledgement of Trump's 93% success this year in getting candidates he's endorsed nominated in primaries. I think the problem, though, is that McConnell is also living in a Bush-Cheney era alternate reality.

We'll have to see how things play out, but if I look at Ukraine's President Zelensky and compare him to wartime leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt, I'm increasingly looking at Trump and seeing something more like Queen Victoria, who had an uncanny ability to connect with the British public despite living a life entirely isolated from them, and indeed despite the fact that she spoke German in private.

At this point, Trump is singlehandedly defining the US political environment, helped enormously by the grave blunder of Biden's handlers and enablers in staging the Mar-a-Lago raid. What on earth were they thinking?