All the frenzied reporting about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago neglected to point out that the nation's leading law enforcement agencies are on the defensive.
On March 24, former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against pretty much anyone who trafficked the bogus Christopher Steele dossier, citing the RICO federal statute normally used to target organized crime.
"The Justice Department’s and FBI’s Aug. 8 raid on Donald Trump’s home happened as the two Biden agencies had a vested interest in the former president’s legal offensive in a Florida courtroom," columnist Rowan Scarborough noted.
Trump's lawsuit was filed against Hillary Clinton, her 2016 presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee, law firm Perkins Coie, former Clinton campaign lawyers Michael Sussmann and Marc Elias, former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, opposition research firm Fusion GPS, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and more.
In filing the lawsuit, Trump attorney Alina Habba said: "This action exposes the remarkably devious tactics employed by the Defendants, who were so blinded by their political ambitions that they acted with callous disregard for the damage they have caused. Clinton and her team weaponized the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal agencies by instigating an investigation they knew had no merit."
Last month, District Court Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks honored a Department of Justice request to dismiss Comey, McCabe, and Strzok as defendants in Trump's lawsuit.
In their place the government asked in a July 14 motion and the judge complied in adding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s DOJ to Trump's lawsuit. Garland’s team immediately asked the judge to dismiss it as a defendant.
"This means Trump no longer faces a roster of only individual Democrats. If the judge lets the case proceed, he faces the Biden administration in his own civil suit at a time Justice is collecting evidence against him in a criminal case. (Not the first time: McCabe in 2017 opened a counter-intelligence probe into Trump that found no collusion)," Scarborough noted in an Aug. 24 analysis for The Washington Times.
Garland ordered the Aug. 8 FBI raid on Trump's Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago around the time he entered the Trump lawsuit as a defendant.
The warrant says Trump is under investigation for harboring secret and top secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.
A federal judge on Saturday announced her "preliminary intent to appoint a special master" to review records seized by the FBI during its unprecedented raid on a former president's residence.
Trump and his legal team filed a motion Monday evening seeking an independent review of the records seized by the FBI during its raid of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, saying the decision to search his private residence just months before the 2022 midterm elections "involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump."
U.S. District Judge from the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Saturday afternoon said that the decision was made upon the review of Trump’s submissions and "the exceptional circumstances presented."
Trump said in a statement after the judge's decision: "Federal Judge in Florida just took over the Presidential Records Act case, including the unprecedented, unnecessary, and unannounced FBI/DOJ Raid (Break-In!) of my home, Mar-a-Lago. This assault was done for political purposes just prior to the Midterm Elections (and 2024, of course!). It is a disgrace to our now Third World Nation!"
The DOJ presumably knows a lot more about Trump’s inside knowledge on “Russiagate” following the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Kash Patel, a key Trump White House intelligence adviser, said on Sunday's Fox News show “Life, Liberty & Levin” that the search warrant was approved by “Political gangsters sitting at the top of the FBI and DOJ who have hijacked the law enforcement and intelligence community just like they did in ‘Russiagate’ for political gain.”
Patel said those who orchestrated the raid on Mar-a-Lago are some of the same players who targeted Trump in 2016 and the same who falsely labeled the verified Hunter Biden laptop as "Russian disinformation."
“The president is the sole and universal arbiter and classification authority in the United States of America,” Patel said. “If he says a document is declassified, or a set of them, that is it. There is no written material required. That is a fiction being created by the fake news and the radical left.”
At the White House in the final weeks, “I witnessed him declassify whole sets of documents,” Patel said.
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