the day of Donald Trump’s FBI raid – The most significant issues with political legitimacy will be raised if the justification for the raid on Trump’s Florida property is anything less than rock-solid. Given the FBI’s actions over the past few years, suspicions are undoubtedly justified.
The FBI conducted a search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida this week. The New York Times reported that the search “appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago. Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents.” They allegedly suspected Trump of handling classified information improperly by taking home materials intended for the National Archives.
Trump immediately expressed his outrage: “This unexpected raid on my house was neither required or acceptable after working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies. Only impoverished, Third World nations could tolerate such an assault. Even my safe was broken into!”
The warrant for the raid has not yet been made available to us. Attorney General Merrick Garland would have needed to approve the raid, as well as the director of the FBI and the Department of Justice, depending on the application or the supporting evidence. And, to put it bluntly, the justification for such a raid, one that a current presidential government ordered against the head of the previous administration and the front-runner for the nomination in 2024, appears incredibly tenuous.
Although the FBI found that it was “possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” complete with access to classified information, they never conducted a home or office raid. In 2015, former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger only received a misdemeanour charge for stuffing classified documents down his pants. In 2016.
Trump, on the other hand, was president, which gave him the full power to declassify any document. But Trump was the target of the raid.
The most serious issues of political legitimacy will consequently be raised if the raid’s justification is anything other than rock-solid. For all intents and purposes, this amounts to the current administration approving a raid on the
It seems to focus on a subject unconnected to what happened on January 6 and what happened following the 2020 election. On the surface, it appears to be a ruse. Until we see the supporting material, we won’t be able to determine whether it is or is not. But the demand for such documentation will be unabated without the kind of trust that the FBI has failed to build over the past few years.
Given the FBI’s actions over the past few years, suspicions are undoubtedly justified. Based on speculative garbage assembled by the Clinton campaign in the form of the so-called Steele dossier, the FBI spent years conducting a thorough investigation into Trump’s
presidential campaign and first year in office. Despite their being no proof that the dossier had any kind of backing, FBI Director James Comey appeared to have leaked that rubbish to the media by giving Trump the dossier. There is a reason why only 39% of Republicans and 45% of independents indicated they trusted the FBI most of the time as of 2018.
The FBI raid on Donald Trump might well mark yet another turning point in the total disintegration of American civic institutions. Every
There must be tangible outcomes and every I must be crossed. Anything less should and will trigger a serious political crisis.
