Stasi Raid Mar-a-Lago

[Gondwanaland]

Nothing has "fallen flat". We know that President Trump had a standing order to declassify numerous documents, we know that his attorneys are on record confirming that there were no classified documents being held at Mar-a-Lago, and we know that he FBI and DOJ have a history of lying and fabricating evidence in order to get their man.

So again, Trump knew a year and a half ago which classified attorney-client privileged documents the FBI were going to plant while he watched them on CCTV a year and a half later, and declassified them ahead of time. I've got some prime real estate in the swamp to sell you.

[seer]

Nothing has "fallen flat". We know that President Trump had a standing order to declassify numerous documents, we know that his attorneys are on record confirming that there were no classified documents being held at Mar-a-Lago, and we know that the FBI and DOJ have a history of lying and fabricating evidence in order to get their man.

Lest we forget:

Declassified FISA Opinion Shows More FBI Abuses

The FBI Continued to Spy on Americans Without a Warrant.

A FISA Court opinion and order declassified today reveals continued FBI abuses of “raw FISA-acquired information.” After a DOJ National Security Division review, the FISA Court noted “the FBI’s failure to properly apply its querying standard when searching Section 702-acquired information was more pervasive than was previously believed.”

https://technofog.substack.com/p/dec...ion-shows-more

[Mountain Man]

Lest we forget:

Yep. The FBI is not a trustworthy orginization.

[Mountain Man]

So again, Trump knew a year and a half ago which classified attorney-client privileged documents the FBI were going to plant while he watched them on CCTV a year and a half later, and declassified them ahead of time. I've got some prime real estate in the swamp to sell you.

I have no idea what you're blathering on about.

[Cow Poke]

It's not the sort of 'gift' anyone wants to get.

Trump isn't "anyone".

I think this will temporarily help Trump's numbers in the Republican presidential primary. But since that is years away the effect will have worn off by the time it happens.

I think it will damage Republican chances in the upcoming midterms. It's galvanized the Trump base, who were going to vote Republican in the midterms anyway. But independents who don't follow politics much and who hear "FBI raid" and think "ooh, sounds bad for Trump" are going to be swayed away from voting Republican on average as a result.

Overall, anyone who thinks this is good for Trump politically is just doing the political calculus wrong.

It's not the raid alone. It's the feckless handling of the border, inflation, the plan to hire tens of thousands of IRS agents....

[Gondwanaland]

I have no idea what you're blathering on about.

I'm speaking about Trumps ever-changing story, you twit.

[rogue06]

Lest we forget:

A few years back one of the FISA judges lit into the FBI for handing over what they knew were phony documents to get their FISA warrant against Trump. There was an implication that there would be serious consequences but I think that was as far as it went.

[Mountain Man]

I'm speaking about Trumps ever-changing story, you twit.

Has he changed his story? He has pretty consistently maintained that he never had classified documents in his possession (affirmed by his lawyers) and that he was openly cooperating with the National Archives to turn over any documents under dispute. Now we have learned that the FBI may have illegally taken privileged information from Trump's residence.

[Mountain Man]

A few years back one of the FISA judges lit into the FBI for handing over what they knew were phony documents to get their FISA warrant against Trump. There was an implication that there would be serious consequences but I think that was as far as it went.

I'm sure the FBI had a good laugh about it later. By all accounts, that was just business as usual. Apparently one of their favorite tricks was "leaking" information to the media, and then using the resulting stories as independent confirmation of the very thing that they themselves had leaked. Remember that next time you see an anonymous attribution in a news article.

[Juvenal]

Trump’s Shifting Explanations Follow a Familiar Playbook
The former president and his allies have given often conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents, without addressing why he had kept them.
.

WASHINGTON — First he said that he was “working and cooperating with” government agents who he claimed had inappropriately entered his home. Then, when the government revealed that the F.B.I., during its search, had recovered nearly a dozen sets of documents that were marked classified, he suggested the agents had planted evidence.

Finally, his aides claimed he had a “standing order” to declassify documents that left the Oval Office for his residence, and that some of the material was protected by attorney-client and executive privilege.

No one thinks any of these excuses are going to work in front of a judge.

We’ve skipped right past the flurry-of-litigation stage following the 2020 election into the calling-up-the-mob stage. We’ve gone from Ashli Babbitt to Ashli Babbitt Lifetime Achievement Awards. The Civil War had defined borders defended by organized armies led by mostly competent generals pursuing articulable goals. Its red-headed stepchild, not so much.
.

“What he doesn’t have the right to do is possess the documents; they are not his,” Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives for more than a decade, said. “There should be no presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, whether they are classified or unclassified or subject to executive privilege or subject to attorney-client privilege.”

Documents covered by executive privilege are meant to be kept within the government.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a message seeking comment.

This case was decided at the Supreme Court in 1977. Presidents do not own their presidential records. We do. All of them, not just those a president is willing to cough up, those we have to go in and retrieve ourselves as well.
.

Mr. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser over 17 months, said he had never heard of the standing order that Mr. Trump’s office claimed to have in place. It is, he said, “almost certainly a lie.”

“I was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy when I came in,” Mr. Bolton said, adding that he had never been told of it while he was working there, and had never heard of such a thing after. “If he were to say something like that, you would have to memorialize that, so that people would know it existed,” he said.

What’s more, he pointed out, secure facilities for viewing sensitive material were constructed at Mr. Trump’s clubs in Florida and New Jersey, where he often spent weekends as president, meaning that the documents wouldn’t need to be declassified. And if they were declassified, Mr. Bolton said, they would be considered subject to public record requests.

He continued, “When somebody begins to concoct lies like this, it shows a real level of desperation.”

When it was clear he’d lost the election, the staff keeping Trump from crashing over the guardrails left. First his campaign attorneys, then his attorney general. After January 6, the last of the aides keeping him cognitively upright left to pursue other opportunities. His legal team has been reduced to openly contemptuous detractors and Christina Bobb. His “best people” have turned on him.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

Trump’s Shifting Explanations Follow a Familiar Playbook
The former president and his allies have given often conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents, without addressing why he had kept them.
.

WASHINGTON — First he said that he was “working and cooperating with” government agents who he claimed had inappropriately entered his home. Then, when the government revealed that the F.B.I., during its search, had recovered nearly a dozen sets of documents that were marked classified, he suggested the agents had planted evidence.

Finally, his aides claimed he had a “standing order” to declassify documents that left the Oval Office for his residence, and that some of the material was protected by attorney-client and executive privilege.

No one thinks any of these excuses are going to work in front of a judge.

We’ve skipped right past the flurry-of-litigation stage following the 2020 election into the calling-up-the-mob stage. We’ve gone from Ashli Babbitt to Ashli Babbitt Lifetime Achievement Awards. The Civil War had defined borders defended by organized armies led by mostly competent generals pursuing articulable goals. Its red-headed stepchild, not so much.
.

“What he doesn’t have the right to do is possess the documents; they are not his,” Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives for more than a decade, said. “There should be no presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, whether they are classified or unclassified or subject to executive privilege or subject to attorney-client privilege.”

Documents covered by executive privilege are meant to be kept within the government.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a message seeking comment.

This case was decided at the Supreme Court in 1977. Presidents do not own their presidential records. We do. All of them, not just those a president is willing to cough up, those we have to go in and retrieve ourselves as well.
.

Mr. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser over 17 months, said he had never heard of the standing order that Mr. Trump’s office claimed to have in place. It is, he said, “almost certainly a lie.”

“I was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy when I came in,” Mr. Bolton said, adding that he had never been told of it while he was working there, and had never heard of such a thing after. “If he were to say something like that, you would have to memorialize that, so that people would know it existed,” he said.

What’s more, he pointed out, secure facilities for viewing sensitive material were constructed at Mr. Trump’s clubs in Florida and New Jersey, where he often spent weekends as president, meaning that the documents wouldn’t need to be declassified. And if they were declassified, Mr. Bolton said, they would be considered subject to public record requests.

He continued, “When somebody begins to concoct lies like this, it shows a real level of desperation.”

When it was clear he’d lost the election, the staff keeping Trump from crashing over the guardrails left. First his campaign attorneys, then his attorney general. After January 6, the last of the aides keeping him cognitively upright left to pursue other opportunities. His legal team has been reduced to openly contemptuous detractors and Christina Bobb. His “best people” have turned on him.

The last paragraph in that NYT article is particularly concerning:

Such accusations of political motivation prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to defend the bureau’s agents during brief remarks earlier this week. Mr. Trump’s unverified accusations also came as the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security last week issued an intelligence bulletin that warned of an increase in threats against federal law enforcement after the search of Mar-a-Lago, including general calls for a “civil war” or “armed rebellion.

Are some of the "crazies" now going to threaten/attack government agents who were merely doing their jobs?

[Gondwanaland]

The last paragraph in that NYT article is particularly concerning:

Such accusations of political motivation prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to defend the bureau’s agents during brief remarks earlier this week. Mr. Trump’s unverified accusations also came as the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security last week issued an intelligence bulletin that warned of an increase in threats against federal law enforcement after the search of Mar-a-Lago, including general calls for a “civil war” or “armed rebellion.

Are some of the "crazies" now going to threaten/attack government agents who were merely doing their jobs?

We already saw one attack FBI offices a day or two after the raid, after the attacker (now dead) posted messages that folks should go kill agents.

[Gondwanaland]

Has he changed his story? .

Yes. Juvenal posted a nice summary of his shifting tales. That's also ignoring his and his sons lies about the warrant and the receipt/list of what was taken. Why you believe a word that comes out his mouth is beyond me.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

We already saw one attack FBI offices a day or two after the raid, after the attacker (now dead) posted messages that folks should go kill agents.

Good grief! I missed that. A quick net search led to this https://www.nationalreview.com/news/...r-a-lago-raid/ Cleary Schiffer was completely deranged.

[CivilDiscourse]

I think it's important to remember that some people's trust of the FBI goes only so far as doing so helps their preferred side:

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/fbi-donald-trump-base-230755

By JOSH GERSTEIN

11/04/2016 05:36 PM EDT
The typical Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent is white, male, and middle-aged, often with a military background — in short, drawn from the segment of the U.S. population most likely to support GOP nominee Donald Trump.

That demographic reality explains much of the heat FBI Director James Comey is taking from his own work force at the moment for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation and inquiries into the Clinton Foundation.

Days before the presidential election, FBI finds itself at the center of a political maelstrom, with Comey being sharply criticized by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and even President Barack Obama, who’ve faulted the FBI director for going public with word of new evidence in the Clinton email probe.

That furor has exposed dissension in the FBI’s ranks, prompting a flurry of leaks about alleged efforts to impede the Clinton-related inquiries and exposing lingering anger among agents about Comey’s July decision not to recommend any charges in the email probe.

Incendiary, politically charged remarks from former FBI officials — with one prominent ex-FBI leader publicly calling the Clintons a “crime family” — are also endangering the law enforcement agency’s reputation for sober, nonpartisan investigation.

© Copyright Original Source

Source: https://truthout.org/articles/the-fbi-has-always-been-political/

The FBI Has Always Been Political

BYDanny Katch, Socialist Worker
PUBLISHEDNovember 8, 2016

Clinton vs. Trump was bound to anticlimax with something out of an Onion headline, and apparently this is the one we’re going to get: “Content-less Election Rocked by Information-less Revelation that May or May Not Involve Anthony Weiner.”

In news that rocked the worlds of a relatively small number of politicians and pundits, FBI Director James Comey announced that while investigating Weiner’s lewd texts with a 15-year-old girl, the agency had “learned of the existence of e-mails” on the computer of Weiner’s partner Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, “that appear to be pertinent to its earlier investigation” of Clinton’s use of a private server for storing classified e-mails.

Comey added that “the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.”

That’s literally all we know, but it’s been enough to “shake up” an election that was getting dangerously close to declining TV ratings.

Donald Trump, of course, declared that the existence of e-mails with unknown content proves that Clinton is engaged in corruption “on a scale we have never seen before” — which is quite a statement coming from someone who really has seen massive amounts of corruption in his time as a tax cheat, real estate swindler and for-profit university con artist.

On the other side, the Clinton campaign has called on its supporters to challenge the credibility of Comey, a Republican appointed to his position by Barack Obama, and Democrats are heeding the call with Trumpian levels of conspiracy-fueled rage.

After weeks of mocking Trump and his supporters for claiming the election is rigged, Democrats now claim that the director of the FBI is trying to steal the election from Clinton.

Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who declared in July that “no one can question the integrity” of Comey after the FBI director cleared Clinton of criminal charges in the e-mail server probe is now suggesting that Comey could be brought up on charges for breaking laws that bar government employees from engaging in political activity.

On November 1, the New York Times ran not one, but two articles — one a “news” story and the other an opinion piece — comparing Comey’s public announcement to the nefarious secret conspiracies of founding FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

© Copyright Original Source

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/03/fbi-leaks-hillary-clinton-james-comey-donald-trump

'The FBI is Trumpland': anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaking, sources say

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.


Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”

The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.

© Copyright Original Source

Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kavanaugh-whitehouse-fbi/

It’s Time to Investigate the FBI—for Its Deep-Fake Kavanaugh Investigation

While most Democrats seem resigned to Kavanaugh's presence on the Supreme Court, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is pushing to keep the case against him alive.

By Elie MystalTwitter

MARCH 17, 2021

...
Late last week, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democratic senator from Rhode Island and, apparently, one of the only senators willing to remember what Republicans did while they were in power, wrote a letter calling on newly confirmed Attorney General Merrick Garland to look into the FBI’s handling of the attempted-rape allegations against Kavanaugh. Specifically, he asked Garland to determine whether the FBI conducted a “fake investigation rather than a sincere, thorough and professional one.” As evidence for the failures of the investigation, Whitehouse points out holes in the FBI’s process that are well known to those of us who have refused to let Kavanaugh get away with it: people and law firms who tried in vain to bring information about Kavanaugh to the bureau but couldn’t find an agent willing to listen; a “tips line” that the FBI never seemed to respond to or follow up on; and repeated “stonewalling” by FBI Director Chris Wray in front of congressional oversight committees about the investigation. Also, the agency failed to follow up on other allegations against Kavanaugh that, in Whitehouse’s words, “required their own investigation.”

...
An investigation of the FBI’s investigation is desperately needed. As Whitehouse’s letter makes clear, this is not just about Kavanaugh’s fitness to sit on the Supreme Court; this is about the reliability of the FBI, and the agency’s willingness to vet political appointees for crimes if there is pressure from the top to look the other way.

© Copyright Original Source

Then of course, there was this warning from VOX

Source: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/2/13486740/trump-fbi-corrupt-revenge

Just imagine what the FBI saga would look like under a vengeful President Trump
By Dara Lind[email protected] Nov 2, 2016, 10:50am EDT

The federal government has to make a lot of judgment calls. Donald Trump doesn’t have judgment — he has a desire for vengeance.

In the last days of the 2016 campaign — as the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server has surged back into the headlines — the American public has been reminded just how much power the federal government has to choose what to investigate and whom to target.

Typically, that power lies mostly unused: Presidents are usually in office to set policy, not to punish their personal enemies. But one of the major party nominees in 2016 is a man defined by the desire for vengeance — a man who carries, as a rule for life, that if someone screws you over, you screw them back “ten times worse.”

The FBI has just reminded America that public officials make subjective decisions all the time. It’s raised the specter of what might happen if those officials had decided, with a unified mind, to use their power over information to punish their enemies and reward their friends.

But the way the story has unfolded — a steady drip of leaks from within the FBI and Department of Justice — has been a reminder that the government isn’t always a unified mind in pursuit of a single goal. It’s made up of various factions with their own agendas, who have plenty of ways of undermining each other if they don’t agree with what their superiors have done.

...
How the federal government could go after a president’s enemies — if it so chose


There are a lot of ways the federal government can make the lives of private citizens hell. Companies that rely on federal contracts can be stripped of permissions like security clearances, or simply get all their contract bids rejected. Government employees are obviously the most beholden, but even people outside the federal government have a lot at stake.

There are dozens of agencies within the federal government tasked with identifying and pursuing potential violations of laws and regulations. The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association includes members of 65 federal agencies. And not every investigative agency counts as law enforcement: Agencies from the Office of Safety and Health Administration to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to the SEC to the EEOC spend a lot of their time looking at potential violations (and pushing the potential violators to cooperate).

They’re increasingly aggressive in their tactics — in 2014, the New York Times found 40 different federal agencies who’d used undercover agents in investigations (including the Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration, and NASA). They have new technologies and tactics of surveillance: Inevitably, surveillance requests that are supposed to be used for anti-terrorism aims end up getting used in more mundane domestic law enforcement.

And they have the ability to cast a wide net.

"We now have an awful lot of federal laws for practically everything," John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation — a former assistant US attorney himself — told me last year for a story I reported on prosecutorial discretion. Many of these laws carry criminal penalties for things that used to be simply regulatory infractions. Until last year, Congress could pass a law that created new crimes without the judiciary committee of either chamber ever getting a look at it.

"When everything all of a sudden becomes a crime, then you have a broad field from which you can pick and choose," said Malcolm.

...

You don’t have to succeed in prosecuting someone to succeed in harassing them


Even if those investigations never result in formal court action, simply complying with a federal investigation can be costly: "forcing someone or a company to spend a lot of money, to answer questions, to produce information, potentially damaging reputations if the investigation were to come out," said Sean Moulton of the Project on Government Oversight. "To know the federal government is looking into you in terms of being a criminal target? That can take an emotional toll on you," Malcolm added in an interview last week.

Because there are so many violations, the question of how investigators choose whom to target becomes the most important one.

This is the reason the Department of Justice has a policy against revealing any information about investigations that could be relevant to a campaign within 60 days of an election. But in practice, as the FBI discovered this year, that policy leads to a lot of judgment calls.

When the FBI concluded that Russia was trying to tamper with the election, did the importance of the information outweigh the fact that it could affect the course of the campaign? The FBI ultimately concluded that it was worth notifying the public — but Comey, according to reports, didn’t want to go public because of the 60-day rule.

When Comey was notified about the new 650,000 emails in late October, did the 60-day window trump another longstanding DOJ practice of updating Congress about investigations after testifying about them in hearings? Comey decided it didn’t. But several former DOJ officials believe he made the wrong choice.

© Copyright Original Source