Whiner in Chief whines about FBI raid on Mar a Lago

Site of FBI raid today at Trump’s Mar a Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida

The New York Times is reporting tonight that FBI agents raided the Palm Beach home of former president Donald Trump this morning.  The agents were said to have stayed in the residence for several hours, and according to Trump, “They even broke into my safe!”

Two branches of the government have to come together in order for a search warrant such as this one to be issued.  The executive branch, in the form of the Department of Justice, must go into a Federal court and convince a member of the judicial branch to issue it.  In this case, FBI agents were executing a search warrant which they obtained from a Federal judge by establishing that they had probable cause to believe a crime had been committed and that the residence being searched could contain evidence of that crime.  The Times reported that the decision to seek the warrant and to execute the search was approved at the highest levels of the Department of Justice – read, by Merrick Garland.  As the Times reported, the search of Mar a Lago “signal[ed] a dramatic escalation in the various investigations into the final stages of his presidency.”

Sources told the Times that the search focused on the 15 boxes of documents and other material Trump brought with him from the White House when he left the presidency.  Some of that material, it was reported, was marked “Classified.”  Failure to turn over materials from the White House to the National Archives could violate the Presidential Records Act, which was passed after the Watergate scandal when Richard Nixon attempted to declare personal ownership of the White House tapes. 

If classified materials were removed from the White House by Trump, that action could violate even more serious statutes than the Presidential Records Act with more severe penalties if the violator is found guilty.  Criminal statutes prohibit anyone who “willfully injures or commits any depredation against any property of the United States” and anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates or destroys” government documents, according to the Times report.  Sources told the Times that the Washington D.C. grand jury has heard testimony from “people who worked in the White House in the final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency.”  Trump was reported to have ripped up documents that were required to be preserved and to have flushed some of his White House records down toilets in the private residence, as well as in toilets in hotels while on foreign trips, such as his trip to Helsinki in 2018 when he met with Vladimir Putin.

In order for FBI agents to break into a safe in Mar a Lago, they had to bring special safe-cracking materials on the raid and have experts with them capable of breaking into a high-security safe.  You want to talk about an escalation of moves against Trump, there it is in capital letters in neon.

There are so many grand juries looking into Trump, it’s hard to know which one could have been involved in authorizing this raid.  One grand jury is looking into Trump’s attempt to get phony electors to file electoral votes with the National Archives to confuse or interrupt the counting of electoral ballots by the Congress on January 6.  Another grand jury in Georgia is investigating Trump’s attempt to get the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” enough votes for him to overturn the election results. 

Trump issued a statement denouncing the raid, saying “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar a Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”  He went on to compare the raid to Watergate, when as he put it, “operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee.”  What is the difference, he asked?  “Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.”

The “operatives” who raided the Democratic offices in the Watergate complex were several Cuban-American thugs and one former CIA agent acting at the behest of a corrupt president.  This morning, the “operatives” were FBI agents acting under the authority of the Attorney General of the United States and a Federal District Court judge who issued the warrant.

What happened today in Palm Beach was indeed unprecedented, but then, practically the entirety of the Trump presidency was unprecedented.  So in a way, today was just another day in the America Donald Trump has left us with.

There is obviously more to come.  Watch this space.