EnglishEdward
Deity
After four years, the sheer joy of watching exasperated Americans from across the pond wears off.
FBI raids Mar-A-Lago; Known criminal Donald Trump still at large
- Thread starter Hygro
- Start date
It is hilarious to watch people defend Trump and make excuses for his ongoing breaking of federal and state laws. While president he had access to to the best legal minds should he choose to use them. Ignorance is no excuse. We watched over four years as he willfully broke the law for his own benefit. Now that he is out of office he is starting to pay for it. US legal proceedings can be slow, but usually they get there. The list of legal action against him is long enough to tie him up for years and send him to jail. Being the worst president in US history does not excuse him from prosecution.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
You don't know what any of this is about, do you.
If I took and held onto protected information from my work I would certainly be fired and likely prosecuted. No reason Trump shouldn't be held to actual consequences for once in his life. He ain't special, shouldn't be above the law.
Judge who green-lit raid at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home donated thousands to Obama
Bruce Reinhart, the federal judge who reportedly signed off on the raid of former President Trump's residence, previously donated thousands to former President Obama's campaign.
www.foxnews.com
Also, I think he was appointed by Trump. Also also, American politics are fascinating
Here's what's next for Trump after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago
The FBI search of former President Donald Trump's residence in Florida on Monday signaled an extraordinary escalation of an investigation into the handling of certain documents from his presidency and raises questions about whether his legal exposure extends beyond whether he improperly took...
www.cnn.com
What would it have taken for the DOJ to have obtained the search warrant?
To get judicial approval for the search, investigators would have had to present to a judge a detailed affidavit that would establish that probable cause exists to believe that a crime had been committed and that that evidence of that crime exists in recent days at the property where the search is being sought.The search warrant would have been filed under seal, meaning that its details are not publicly available at the moment (though they could become public in the future). The federal courthouse in West Palm Beach lists only one sealed search warrant application since June that was still not closed as of Friday, according to the court's public register of cases.
But before prosecutors got to the point of asking a magistrate judge to approve the warrant, in order to move forward with a search that carried such historical and political significance, investigators would have had to obtain the OK from the highest levels of the Justice Department, legal experts told CNN.
Former DOJ officials told CNN that it was likely that, at the very least, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to have given the green light and that Attorney General Merrick Garland and/or FBI Director Chris Wray may have also been consulted. "Not only would the investigators have to suggest it, not only would a line prosecutor have to agree with it, but multiple layers of management would have had to approved of it -- all the way up to the Attorney General," Daren Firestone, a former DOJ attorney, told CNN. The Justice Department has declined to comment.
What does this mean for Trump's legal exposure?
To take the extraordinary step of executing a search warrant on a former president's home suggests investigators are looking at more than what the National Archives had previously recovered from Mar-a-Lago, according to legal experts.In January, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of records from Mar-a-Lago, including materials that had been identified as classified, but activity around those boxes have been quiet since the spring. "I really don't believe that the department would have taken such a significant step as pursuing a search warrant for the president's residence about information they already had back," Andrew McCabe, a former FBI deputy director and CNN contributor, said on CNN "Newsroom." "There had to be a suspicion, a concern and indeed specific information that led them to believe that there were additional materials that were not turned over."
Before the news of Monday's search, a law known as the Presidential Records Act had been forefront of public speculation about Trump's legal jeopardy as other investigatory steps were taken related to the handling of documents from Trump's White House. That law -- passed after Watergate to make clear that certain records from a presidency belong to the public and not the former office holder -- is not a criminal statute and has been seen as relatively toothless law. A search warrant and the presence of the FBI signifies a criminal investigation. There are other record retention statutes that bring with them criminal penalties -- such as the Espionage Act -- but at this point it's not clear what criminal statutes have been implicated in the Justice Department investigation.
It is a crime to destroy or remove federal records, or to mishandle classified documents. There are other federal laws that aim prevent the tampering of information during an investigation.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department issued subpoenas for presidential materials including classified documents that the National Archives had previously retrieved. The FBI also interviewed Trump aides at Mar-a-Lago in the spring as part of the probe, according to a source familiar with the matter.
For investigators to escalate their probe with a search, "there would have to be something serious enough that would merit more than a slap on the wrist," Firestone, now a partner at the DC-based firm Levy Firestone Muse, said.
It's also notable that the DOJ hasn't gone the route of civil litigation against the former president for how he handled the documents in question. Just last week, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against former Trump White House official Peter Navarro, alleging that Navarro had violated the Presidential Records Act and seeking a court order compelling him to turn over emails from a private account that he used while working at the Trump White House.
Why now?
The search was executed two months after the previously unreported June 3 meeting between DOJ investigators and Trump's attorneys at the resort. During the visit, reported by CNN on Monday, four investigators, including the chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, toured a basement where boxes of materials were being stored. Five days later, investigators sent Trump's attorneys a letter asking them to further secure the room storing the documents, prompting aides to add a padlock to the room.For the FBI to execute a search warrant two months later hints that the federal officials were not satisfied with what they saw on the visit or that they were not confident in the voluntary cooperation they were receiving from Trump's team, some legal experts said. It's possible federal officials also needed official sign off to repossess classified records. "The fact that the FBI learned Trump still had documents at [Mar a Lago] in June, and felt the need to come back two months later with a search warrant, indicates to me that the agency has evidence that Trump and his staff were holding onto additional classified records and not taking any steps to properly return them to the Archives," Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer, told CNN in an email.
At least 12 more boxes of documents were retrieved yesterday from Trump.
Ajidica
High Quality Person
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Nope.Judge who green-lit raid at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home donated thousands to Obama
Bruce Reinhart, the federal judge who reportedly signed off on the raid of former President Trump's residence, previously donated thousands to former President Obama's campaign.
Also, I think he was appointed by Trump. Also also, American politics are fascinating
Bruce Reinhart is a magistrate judge.
Sort of like a judge appointed by other judges to help out in the area.
United States magistrate judge - Wikipedia
I wish our politics were more boring.
Yes, Reinhart quit his job 14 years ago to work for Epstein, because of course he did.
This country is like a circus on some cosmic, fundamental level.
It's not about petty revenge and it doesn't matter how long ago he was defeated when he's still a major figure in the republican party.
He suuuuper broke the law, repeatedly, over the 4 years he was president, in countless ways that if anyone else had done them they'd have been thrown in jail for life years ago. He did really bad stuff and needs to face the consequences of his actions, we can't just set a standard of "the president's allowed to commit whatever crimes they want because punishing them would be too political or something"
I seem to recall a story that ran while Trump was in office, of how some people that could be linked to Trump or his inner circle of sleazebags, had attempted to sell highly classified information, possibly from US intelligence, to foreign individuals. But I can't remember the details or whether anything in the story was verified.
Remorseless1
Emperor
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2022
- Messages
- 1,214
Somebody missed the J6 events. Too bad, it was fascinating television.
Nope.
Bruce Reinhart is a magistrate judge.
Sort of like a judge appointed by other judges to help out in the area.
United States magistrate judge - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I wish our politics were more boring.
Yes, Reinhart quit his job 14 years ago to work for Epstein, because of course he did.
This country is like a circus on some cosmic, fundamental level.
I don't know anything about judge-shopping in that region. And obviously we'd need to know the political leanings of the judges who appointed him.
BUT, it's hard to believe that before crossing this Rubicon, someone who was politically savvy didn't say "okay, let's safety check this".
There's now even more risk than there was before. Let's hope it was a successful gamble. I'm still buying gold.
Perfection
The Great Head.
When Trump throws his lunch in prison, nobody will give him a new lunch.
Trump Launches Conspiracy Theory That FBI Was 'Planting' Evidence At Mar-a-Lago
And Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has joined the right-wing influencers backing him up.https://www.huffpost.com/author/arthur-delaney
By Arthur Delaney
Aug 10, 2022, 04:37 PM EDT| Updated 2 hours ago
Former president Donald Trump and his allies are preemptively warning that any incriminating evidence found at his Florida estate was planted there by the FBI. Trump complained on his ersatz social media platform Wednesday that his lawyers were not allowed to observe the federal agents who searched the property on Monday. “Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting,’” Trump wrote. “Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out?”
The FBI searched Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, reportedly as part of an investigation into Trump’s well-documented refusal to turn over presidential records at the end of his term. The Justice Department has not divulged any details about the investigation. The National Archives and Records Administration has said Trump belatedly delivered 15 boxes of documents this year. Because the boxes contained classified material that the president had removed from the White House, the agency said it notified the Department of Justice.
Instead of waiting for any information about the investigation, Republicans in Congress have rushed to Trump’s defense, saying they will retaliate against the Justice Department and suggesting that it’s fundamentally improper to investigate whether the former president broke the law. Now Trump’s allies are also saying that if a crime was committed, Trump didn’t do it. Right-wing influencers such as Newt Gingrich, Charlie Kirk, Alex Jones and Steve Bannon on Tuesday came up with the theory that the FBI raided Trump’s property to plant evidence. Fox News host Jesse Waters amplified the baseless claim on his show that evening.
“This is how a conspiracy-minded talking point is constructed in real time,” Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertz wrote in a blog post chronicling the takeoff. “It is reminiscent of how right-wing media figures, in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, attributed the widespread violence to antifa infiltrators. On Wednesday morning, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) lamented that people “distrust so much the government” that he had no choice but to repeat Trump’s insinuation that the FBI was out to get him.
“Do I know that the boxes of material that they took from Mar-a-Lago, that they won’t put things in those boxes to entrap him?” Paul said on Fox News. “How do we know? Their lawyers weren’t allowed to see the boxes go.”
Good golly. Actively eroding the process immediately.
