by Sharon Rondeau
(Aug. 20, 2022) — On Friday 45th President Donald J. Trump spent most of the day posting links to articles, memes and photos on his TruthSocial platform without additional commentary. However, in the evening he reverted to expressing his frustration with the FBI raid which took place at his Florida home beginning in the early morning of August 8.
“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,” he began the three-part comment. “At some point you have to look at what took place in the past to determine what is going on in the present….”
“Never in our Country’s history has there been a time where law enforcement has been so viciously and violently involved in the life and times of politics in our Nation,” Trump’s last tweet in the series reads. “Even in light of the fact that they violated the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, the Mueller Witch Hunt, lied many times before Congress, and on many occasions put out fraudulent information before the FISA Court, they continue. They have no shame. They are destroying our Country!”
Approximately an hour later he made an announcement, connecting the raid, as others have, to the FBI’s investigation into his 2016 campaign for alleged “collusion” with Russia, a claim which proved unfounded by a 22-month special-counsel investigation concluding in March 2019. “A major motion pertaining to the Fourth Amendment will soon be filed concerning the illegal Break-In of my home, Mar-a-Lago, right before the ever important Mid-Term Elections,” Trump wrote. “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!”
While refraining from making an official declaration, it is widely expected Trump will announce his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in the near future.
As noted by Law and Crime, a longstanding U.S. Department of Justice policy has been to observe “election year sensitivities” in regard to “investigations or criminal charges” of candidates as well as political activity on the part of government employees which could violate the Hatch Act.
Trump has made dozens of endorsements of candidates for the 2022 congressional midterm elections as well as governors, state attorneys general and state legislators, many of whom have won primaries over incumbents such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Rep. Jaime Herrera-Buetler (R-WA). In Arizona, political novice Blake Masters won the Republican U.S. Senate primary over an incumbent attorney general, Mark Brnovich.
Just a month before, Masters’s campaign was said by some to be “imploding.”
On Friday night, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL1) told “Hannity” host Sean Hannity that a total of 14 whistleblowers have come forward from the FBI reporting political bias, which Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) termed a “deeply rooted political infection” in an August 17 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“Starting on May 31, 2022, I’ve written three letters to you regarding political bias that has
infected the FBI’s Washington Field Office1,” Grassley’s letter begins. “Two of those letters provided specific and credible allegations based on numerous whistleblowers that have approached my office with information that one can only conclude is indicative of a deeply rooted political infection that has spread to investigative activity into former President Trump and Hunter Biden.”
According to JusttheNews founder John Solomon, the Washington, DC Field Office spearheaded the Mar-a-Lago raid. On August 11, Solomon presented a timeline of how the events leading up to the raid unfolded.
Grassley’s letter followed an August 9 phone call after which he reported he “expressed serious concern that what little remains of the FBI’s credibility is on the line following its inconsistent handling of politically sensitive investigations, failure to hold its own employees accountable for misconduct and consistent disregard for congressional oversight” to Wray. “Last night’s raid on the home of a former U.S. president without explanation will only further erode confidence in the FBI and the Justice Department,” he wrote of the conversation.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH4) has echoed Gaetz’s claim about the number of FBI whistleblowers who have come forward to report political bias at the Bureau.
If and when he announces his candidacy, Trump will become the presumptive opponent of current White House occupant Joe Biden. In August 2019, an unnamed “whistleblower” from the intelligence community complained to Congress that Trump was “abusing his office” during a telephone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he asked the newly-elected leader to launch an investigation into whether the “Biden family” had engaged in inappropriate activity while Joe Biden was a sitting vice president and Obama’s “point man” on Ukraine.
The “whistleblower” complaint, which related second-hand information, became the catalyst for the House of Representatives’ first impeachment of the 45th president. “In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the complaint reads. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”
Hearings held by the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee generated two articles of impeachment which ultimately failed to gain a conviction in the Senate.
A number of legal commentators believe the search and seizure on Mar-a-Lago was unconstitutional given the breadth of the search warrant, released on August 12, which appeared to target alleged “classified” and “top secret” documents but also called for the collection of all documents generated during Trump’s four-year term.
The Fourth Amendment reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In his broadcast Wednesday, Mark Levin, an attorney who served as chief of staff to then-Attorney General Edwin Meese under President Reagan, opined that “the Fourth Amendment prohibits what used to be called ‘general warrants,’ if you will. General warrants were used by the Crown during the colonial period to search somebody’s home, their person, their business, or anything they wanted to. The Crown would issue a general warrant or they would delegate that authority to their people on the scene, and they would break into the homes of these colonists if they suspected them of anything and they could go through all their papers and search them and do all the rest of it. Well, this really was a problem as far as the colonists were concerned, so when we did write our own constitution, we would later add this Bill of Rights, and the Fourth Amendment talks about, among other things, you have to have a search warrant based on probable cause, but even more, that probable cause has to have a particularized and specific area, thing and purpose for investigation. The word “particular” is in the Fourth Amendment. In item “c” on the warrant, it talks about ‘and any other presidential or related material — something to that effect that Donald Trump the day he stepped into the presidency and the day he left the presidency…”
“and any other presidential or related material”
By the Presidential Records Act those would be items that belong to the US Government. Unless Trump can show that they are personal items as described in the Presidential Records Act.
By the Presidential Records Act the more than 100 CLASSIFIED, TOP SECRET and SCI emails on Hillary Clinton’s unsecured private email server, in an unsecured bathroom, in the unsecured basement of her unsecured private residence in Chappaqua belonged to U.S. Government.
After she ignored a Congressional subponea for her server’s hard-drive the DoJ did not get a warrant and have 30+ FBI agents raid her home at Oh Dark Thirty with colored lights flashing and sirens wailing, keep her lawyer(s) outside, and spend the day rummaging through her entire home and taking whatever they wanted…including her passport(s). She also had her IT people remove thousands of emails from her server’s hard-drive that SHE ALONE decided were personal and then erase her server’s hard-drive…destroying government property in the process. She also had 10+ government-issued personal communications devices smashed…destroying even more government property.
No doubt Hillary et al will eventually be prosecuted. Oh wait…