Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Another possible scenario I’ve heard people floating about what the Trumps will do is that they will manufacture a fake ‘summary’ of the real warrant and release that to show there was nothing found.

You know, kind of like when Barr got out ahead of Mueller’s report with a fake summary of what was found.

I don’t really think they’ll try that here though - and I don’t think it would work. This is bigger.

Well, anyway, we should know by 3 pm today where this goes. Trump's team has to say yea or nay to the DOJ releasing the material.

My Guess: Even though they have all been demanding "more transparency" (laughable in itself, coming from them), they will say "No way" to the release. They will dream up some bullshit about having to review blah, blah, blah. They know the puppets will back them.

“The reintroducing of his radioactive persona and politics is coming at a very inopportune time for Republicans,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota GOP. “Republicans want this election cycle to be about Joe Biden, inflation, jobs and the economy, and right now, it’s becoming more about Donald Trump. And just like a rock in the shoe that won’t go away, he’s back again, and it’s going to complicate an election cycle that was trending to be a very uncomplicated one for Republicans.”

It was a much more potent issue for the coming election.

Why is Donald Trump so powerful? How did he come to dominate one of the two major parties and get himself elected president? Is it his hair? His waistline? No, it’s his narratives. Trump tells powerful stories that ring true to tens of millions of Americans.

The main one is that America is being ruined by corrupt coastal elites. According to this narrative, there is an interlocking network of highly educated Americans who make up what the Trumpians have come to call the Regime: Washington power players, liberal media, big foundations, elite universities, woke corporations. These people are corrupt, condescending and immoral and are looking out only for themselves. They are out to get Trump because Trump is the person who stands up to them. They are not only out to get Trump; they are out to get you.

This narrative has a core of truth to it. Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class. But the Trumpian propaganda turns what is an unfortunate social chasm into venomous conspiracy theory. It simply assumes, against a lot of evidence, that the leading institutions of society are inherently corrupt, malevolent and partisan and are acting in bad faith.

It simply assumes that the proof of people’s virtue is that they’re getting attacked by the Regime. Trump’s political career has been kept afloat by elite scorn. The more elites scorn him, the more Republicans love him. The key criterion for leadership in the Republican Party today is having the right enemies.

Into this situation walks the F.B.I. There’s a lot we don’t know about the search at Mar-a-Lago. But we do know how the Republican Party reacted. The right side of my Twitter feed was ecstatic. See! We really are persecuted! Essays began to appear with titles like “The Regime Wants Its Revenge.” Ron DeSantis tweeted, “The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” As usual, the tone was apocalyptic. “This is the worst attack on this Republic in modern history,” the Fox News host Mark Levin exclaimed.

The investigation into Trump was seen purely as a heinous Regime plot. At least for now, the search has shaken the Republican political landscape. Several weeks ago, about half of Republican voters were ready to move on from Trump, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. This week the entire party seemed to rally behind him. Republican strategists advising Trump’s potential primary opponents had reason to be despondent. “Completely handed him a lifeline,” one such strategist told Politico. “Unbelievable … It put everybody in the wagon for Trump again. It’s just taken the wind out of everybody’s sails.”

According to a Trafalgar Group/Convention of States Action survey, 83 percent of likely Republican voters said the F.B.I. search made them more motivated to vote in the 2022 elections. Over 75 percent of likely Republican voters believed Trump’s political enemies were behind the search rather than the impartial justice system, as did 48 percent of likely general election voters overall.

In a normal society, when politicians get investigated or charged, it hurts them politically. But that no longer applies to the G.O.P. The judicial system may be colliding with the political system in an unprecedented way.

What happens if a prosecutor charges Trump and he is convicted just as he is cruising to the G.O.P. nomination or maybe even the presidency? What happens if the legal system, using its criteria, decides Trump should go to prison at the very moment that the electoral system, using its criteria, decides he should go to the White House?

I presume in those circumstances Trump would be arrested and imprisoned. I also presume we would see widespread political violence from incensed Trump voters who would conclude that the Regime has stolen the country. In my view, this is the most likely path to a complete democratic breakdown.

In theory, justice is blind, and obviously no person can be above the law. But as Damon Linker wrote in a Substack post, “This is a polity, not a graduate seminar in Kantian ethics.” We live in a specific real-world situation, and we all have to take responsibility for the real-world effects of our actions.

America absolutely needs to punish those who commit crimes. On the other hand, America absolutely needs to make sure that Trump does not get another term as president. What do we do if the former makes the latter more likely? I have no clue how to get out of this potential conflict between our legal and political realities.

We’re living in a crisis of legitimacy, during which distrust of established power is so virulent that actions by elite actors tend to backfire, no matter how well founded they are.

My impression is that the F.B.I. had legitimate reasons to do what it did. My guess is it will find some damning documents that will do nothing to weaken Trump’s support. I’m also convinced that, at least for now, it has unintentionally improved Trump’s re-election chances. It has unintentionally made life harder for Trump’s potential primary challengers and motivated his base.

It feels as though we’re walking toward some sort of storm and there’s no honorable way to alter our course.

This narrative has a core of truth to it. Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class.

Former President Donald Trump has characteristically growled, yapped and roared against the FBI’s execution of a warrant issued by an independent federal judge authorizing a particularized search for evidence of crimes in his Mar-a-Logo residence — potentially destruction of presidential records or unauthorized sharing of classified information. Trump’s appointee, FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was confirmed by a 92-5 Senate majority with only Democrats in opposition, supervised the search.

Actions speak louder than words. Trump has scampered away from available immediate legal challenges to the FBI search — a tacit concession that his semi-hysterical histrionics are sound and fury signifying nothing.

Rule 41 (g) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure authorizes Trump to file suit demanding a return of all materials seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago by proof that the search warrant or its execution was legally defective. The text is clear to persons unschooled in the law: “A person aggrieved by an unlawful search and seizure of property or by the deprivation of property may move for the property’s return…The court must receive evidence on any factual issue necessary to decide the motion. If it grants the motion, the court must return the property to the movant.” None among the former president’s long roster of lawyers has questioned the legality of the search under Rule 41 (g).

In the minutes after an armed man in body armor tried to breach an FBI field office in Cincinnati, an account with the suspect’s name, Ricky Shiffer, posted to former president Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social: “If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I.”

The Shiffer account appeared to be one of Truth Social’s most prolific posters, writing 374 messages there in the past eight days — mostly to echo Trump’s lies about election fraud and, in the hours after FBI agents searched Trump’s Florida home, calling for all-out war. “Be ready to kill the enemy,” Shiffer had posted on Tuesday. “Kill [the FBI] on sight.”
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In April, Shiffer tweeted at Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., that he had just opened his account there, adding, “I’m just waiting for your Dad.”

Authorities declined to comment on whether Shiffer was connected to Truth Social and Twitter accounts, but both featured his name, photo and general location and had been active before the shooting.

The National Archives and Records Administration issued a statement Friday in an attempt to counter misstatements about former president Barack Obama’s presidential records after several days of misinformation that had been spread by former president Donald Trump and conservative commentators.

Since the FBI search of his Florida home and club this week for classified documents, Trump has asserted in social media posts that Obama “kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified” and that they were “taken to Chicago by President Obama.”

In its statement, NARA said that it obtained “exclusive legal and physical custody” of Obama’s records when he left office in 2017. It said that about 30 million pages of unclassified records were transferred to a NARA facility in the Chicago area and that they continue to be maintained “exclusively by NARA.”

Classified records from Obama are kept in a NARA facility in Washington, the statement said.

“As required by the [Presidential Records Act], former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration,” the statement said.

Despite the official statement, Trump continued to peddle his false claims in light of The Washington Post report that classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of Trump’s Florida residence Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Within minutes of the statement from the Archives, Trump again pushed his evidence-free claim in response to the latest reports, saying, “What are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?”