Feds raid Mar-a-Lago: “They even broke into my safe!”

[...]



[...]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/8/2115281/-Feds-raid-Mar-a-Lago?pm_source=story_sidebar&pm_medium=web&pm_campaign=recommended

****************

Traitor Trump broke America so let Traitor Trump suffer the consequences.

Little Marco must be worried that there are pictures of his tiny pee pee in Dotards safe.


Marco Rubio
@marcorubio
·
Follow
The FBI isn’t doing anything about the groups vandalizing Catholic Churches, firebombing Pro-Life groups or threatening Supreme Court justices

But they find time to raid Mar A Lago
8:34 PM · Aug 8, 2022

Some documents in the 15 boxes were so highly classified that describing what they were, was classified.


Maybe Melania tipped off the FBI after she found out Dotard was going to bury her in his golf course.

Florida reacts to Dotards disgrace. Niki Fried will make a statement outside Mafia Ron's dump at 9 am today. Can't wait.

It's actually sad that it had to come to a president needing to be raided, but... that's the situation Trump created.  I'm not glorying in it, because it's more tragic than anything that the country slipped so far that it let in a con-man who flouted the law.   It's even more tragic that such a person still has support, just because a bunch of drooling dullards who can't -- and don't want to -- understand basic things about the world have been trained to hate a stereotype of people they don't even know so much that they're willing to accept a criminal for a leader.  

When one is used to unlimited privilege, accountability feels like oppression.  So the reaction from the Trump cult -- who, for some reason that makes no sense to anyone sane, have decided the world's biggest sociopath is a savior who can do no wrong -- is that blasphemy has a been done.  Sacrilege.  And, not unpredictably, they're calling for violence.  Again.

So far they seem to be doing what they mostly do -- rage-eating Cheetos and listening to angry podcasts from the people who are raking in big televangelist dollars from stoking their fears and moron-ire.  And overreacting like lunatics.  Podcasters are screaming for "war."   Bottom-feeding grifter Kari Lake and her I-don't-like-to-have-to-bother-with-hygiene haircut are swearing that she'll have Arizona secede from the union if she's elected governor (yeah, great, try to get elected on THAT strategy -- appeal to the absolute whack-a-loon cultists and nobody else and see how that works out for your grimy unwiped ass, ya yappin' pekingese poltroon).

The crazier they get, the less any sane person wants to trust them to hold power. There's a difference between not liking something or not being happy about a thing that happened and retreating into a fantasy world so you don't have to accept it. And Trump cultists have become so mired down in a childish inability to face facts that they've gone total bugshit. They lost an election and decided "we can just pretend it was stolen." Based what? "Nobody in this carefully-constructed bubble I live in would've voted for Biden, I think he's dumb, so therefore it couldn't have happened! That's all the proof I need!"

Fucking whackaloons who have no idea that there's a world outside their fantasies. They don't get that they're ingesting nothing but propaganda, so they don't even realize it is propaganda. You can't reach 'em.

I've already seen that blockhead (literally) Dan Bongino claiming they raided Trump "because they don't like his politics." It's got nothing fucking to do with his politics. What even are Trump's politics? Nobody really knows, because the man doesn't have any ideology at all, he just has a cavernous ego that requires constant feeding. If banning abortion makes people "like" him then he'll ban abortion. If kicking babies through a goalpost made people like him, he'd do that, too. He'd ban guns if that got him approval... he doesn't fucking care. It's not about his "politics" -- it's about his criminal activity.

And, much as I hate to say it about one of Obama's picks, Merrick Garland turns out to be a timid milquetoast -- he's got a spine of linguine, so you better damn betcha that if he signed off on this then there was a strong reason to do it. They knew what they were after and they knew it needed doing.

Because it's predictable as the rain that this is going to result in violence from right-wingers. It doesn't take much... they're so eager to kill anybody who holds a different opinion from them or doesn't bow to their "god" that they can't sit still. It doesn't take much to make them violent. But it's like parenting -- you can't let the fact that a toddler's gonna throw a tantrum decide what's right and wrong to do. What Trump has done cannot be allowed to go unanswered. Otherwise this nation's laws don't mean anything. And there's little to lose trying to appease crazy right-wingers who are already going to get violent anyway. That's what they're about at this point. It's mostly posturing from a bunch of tired old halfway-to-the-grave pieces of shit, anyway, but, yeah, some idiots will do some Timmy McVeigh shit over this, you can bet on that. They always do, whether you try to appease them or not.

So, it's sad that America elected a con-man like Trump and has to serve warrants, but big mistakes require big clean-ups, and Trump's done damage enough to this country. If a blind eye's turned and it's allowed to go unanswered, then it becomes a precedent, and it'll just happen again, and again.

And it'll likely happen again, anyway, if Republicans get power again. They've completely given up on the Constitution, the law, and reality itself.

Stay turned. The gloves are now off. And I don't give a flying fuck what happens to trump. But you won't like how this ends.

Nobody's going to refuse to uphold the law because it's going to make a bunch of terrorists mad. Everything the right-wingers are now threatening are the same things they've been threatening for a year and a half already -- "gonna have a civil war, gonna investigate all the Democrats," blah-blah-fucking-blah. Everybody knows what they are, everybody knows they're going to kangaroo-court and do terrorist actions regardless of what anybody does or doesn't do, so there's no reason to negotiate anymore. Trump's cult is a terrorist cell already, fed on bullshit, and they're gonna do what they're gonna do. It makes no difference if you do what they want, or if you do what should be done. America's being held hostage by a bunch of idiots, and they've proven to only get worse if you give them concessions.

I don't give a fuck how big a tantrum he wants to throw, Trump can't be allowed to keep sensitive information at Mar-A-Lago. It's a national security matter, for one thing -- that place has been broken into before. And, for another, the man can't be trusted not to sell America's secrets to foreign countries, or just give them away. Trump would give Putin anything he wanted, possibly because Putin has blackmail material on him, or, if that's not the case, just because Trump is a needy daddy-damaged bitch and desperately wants Putin to "like" him.

And Republicans go along with it because they're too fucking stupid and spiteful not to. They don't care if it's a national security risk, all they see is "oh no, this looks like a win for the libtards!" They treat politics like it's some football rivalry -- "our 'team' has to score 'points' and nothing else matters!"

It's idiotic, and they're so high off the gas in the propaganda bubbles that have been built for them they think everybody is as hysterical as they are. Normal human beings who just want to be left the fuck alone are getting sick of this shit, and when the right-wingers start blowing things up and shooting people and having bogus "trials" over their fantasies, the normal people are just going to get even sicker of 'em. Most people do not want a Christian theocracy. And the more right-wingers do terrorist actions to make it clearer that it's going to be a big problem, the less patience anybody's gonna have for their bullshit. I mean, good fucking luck trying to sell that QAnon whacky shit to sane people who just want to get through their day. Start rolling a bigger body count behind it and not many people are going to be willing to put up with it for long. Tim McVeigh made right-wingers a pariah for years. And there'll be more Tim McVeighs from the right. It's what they do now. It's a fucking white supremacist, obnoxious-Christian-forced-on-everybody-else terrorist party at this point. All it's making is enemies out of normal people. Great fucking tactic, it's sure to work out really well.

A lot of the same stuff I was saying, but it's funnier and better when Trae says it.




Edited to add Brent!  



"Kickin' in the door, scarin' Eric off his Fleshlight, Don Jr. probably dumpin' powder down the toilet like he's Karen from Goodfellas...  Keep it up, President Brandon, you wicked evil mastermind who's also got dementia!"  

Trump the 5th. It's time real Americans openly scorned all MAGAs.

Trump pleads the 5th 400 times.

Need any more reasons to despise Dotard and the stooges that support and vote for him?

Russia's claiming they already have the nuclear documents from Trump.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/moscow-already-studying-top-secret-records-from-trump-raid-russian-media/ar-AA10DaaM

This is VERY highly likely to be bullshit, and Russia's just trying to spread paranoia and jerking America's intelligence communities around. If they did have the intel they probably wouldn't admit it. But, regardless, it's a reason why you don't freakin' keep classified documents at a golf club! You can't just play around with 'em because you want to impress your friends or whatever the hell Trump was doing, provided he wasn't peddling them to enemy countries for cash or trade. Because now we have a situation where we have to wonder, is it bullshit or not?

O' course, we don't know that the documents the FBI took out involved nuclear stuff. That's a rumor, but rumors are rumors -- sometimes they're true, sometimes they aren't. Depends on what's in 'em to see if Russia's little bluff (or whatever the taunt is) is much that should concern anybody. But since Trump took all this stuff, we have to wonder what else he may have taken out with him and already gotten rid of or sold or traded. Once someone's established as breaking rules, you can't trust them with much of anything. If you found out about this, you can bet there's more you didn't find out about.

Thanks to Trump, America has a big mess to clean up. We may have to change around a bunch of plans, etc. just because Russia might know. Putin most definitely had a weak, needy lap-dog in Trump. He knew it and you can bet he exploited it. And, unsupervised, Trump would give Putin anything he wanted, because Trump's daddy-issues make him neeeeeeeed guys like Putin to "like" him.

It remains to be determined exactly how sensitive or criminal these documents might have been -- and it should be noted that the DOJ is not claiming anything arrestable was done at this point in time -- and we can hope nothing too sensitive to national security was kept in that unsafe location. But, regardless, America now has a mess that it wouldn't have had to deal with if Trump didn't just play fast and loose with security.

I swear, I wish conservatives would smarten up and quit falling in love with sociopaths just because they're turned on by how hateful they are. But they keep doing it over and over again. That sleazy, filthy-lookin' Kari Lake was gushing over speculation of what a "big dick" she thinks Ron DeSantis has. Weird times for the supposed "Christian" party... We're going to keep having these problems as long as they keep electing lunatics. And they're doing it out of pure spite.

This made a good point:



"What they want is to make sure that somebody else doesn't get what they want. ... Anti-woke, really when you get down to it, it means anti-freedom. ... They don't want anybody else to possibly enjoy something or have a freedom or exercise an option that they don't want them to. Anti-woke means anti-freedom, it means pro-control, that somehow the stereotypical person who screams about 'wokeness,' that person should have control over what everybody else does. They get to decide what's right for you. ... It's unique, but it's also very fitting. It's what the Republican party has turned into. The Republican party doesn't want to represent, they don't want a representative democracy, they don't want to represent they people, they want to RULE the people. They want to dictate from up on high what you can do down to what kind of sausage you can enjoy."

True dat. My state now has a bit of a problem. We have a big law school, Ole Miss. Now your law degree from Ole Miss is going to be ridiculous because Mississippi has outlawed the teaching of Critical Race Theory. That was never being taught in grade or high school anyway, but it is an important part of law school. If you don't learn that, it's like getting a degree in science without getting to hear about Darwin.

And give 'em time, Republicans are going to foist that one on schools, too, the second they feel like they can get away with it.

As long as they keep electing ignorant children because of spiteful "own the libs" bullshit, America's going to keep having issues like it's having now, with the "does Russia know or don't they?" question.

What a freakin' mess.

Only it's not easy to just go about your own business when the cracker barrel boys keep poking their noses into your sausage.

It'd be nice if we could play by just ONE set of rules... while both Clinton's get to play by none.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/old-case-over-audio-tapes-bill-clintons-sock-drawer-could-impact

When it comes to the National Archives, history has a funny way of repeating itself. And legal experts say a decade-old case over audio tapes that Bill Clinton once kept in his sock drawer may have significant impact over the FBI search of Melania Trump's closet and Donald Trump's personal office.

The case in question is titled Judicial Watch v. National Archives and Records Administration and it involved an effort by the conservative watchdog to compel the Archives to forcibly seize hours of audio recordings that Clinton made during his presidency with historian Taylor Branch.

For pop culture, the case is most memorable for the revelation that the 42nd president for a time stored the audio tapes in his sock drawer at the White House. The tapes became the focal point of a 2009 book that Branch wrote.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington D.C. ultimately rejected Judicial Watch's suit by concluding there was no provision in the Presidential Records Act to force the National Archives to seize records from a former president.

But Jackson's ruling — along with the Justice Department's arguments that preceded it — made some other sweeping declarations that have more direct relevance to the FBI's decision to seize handwritten notes and files Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago. The most relevant is that a president's discretion on what are personal vs. official records is far-reaching and solely his, as is his ability to declassify or destroy records at will.

"Under the statutory scheme established by the PRA, the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President's term and in his sole discretion," Jackson wrote in her March 2012 decision, which was never appealed.

"Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records," she added.

You can read the full ruling here:

File
memorandum opinion.pdf

The judge noted a president could destroy any record he wanted during his tenure and his only responsibility was to inform the Archives.

As to whether records a president concluded were personal can be forcibly seized after he leaves office, the court concluded it was unreasonable to force NARA to go get the tapes

"Because the audiotapes are not physically in the government's possession, defendant submits that it would be required to seize them directly from President Clinton in order to assume custody and control over them," Jackson noted. "Defendant considers this to be an 'extraordinary request' that is unfounded, contrary to the PRA's express terms, and contrary to traditional principles of administrative law. The Court agrees."

That defendant was the same Justice Department that authorized the raid on Trump's estate. You can read their arguments a decade earlier here:

File
Hearing Transcript.pdf


Jackson also concluded that a decision to challenge a president's decision lies solely with the National Archives and can't be reviewed by a court. If the Archives wants to challenge a decision, that agency and the attorney general can initiate an enforcement mechanism under the law, but it is a civil procedure and has no criminal penalty, she noted.

The search warrant the FBI enforced sought two types of records: classified materials and records created during the Trump presidency. Trump has been adamant the records he took to Mar-a-Lago were both declassified and deemed personal by him.

Some government lawyers reached out privately to Just the News in recent days questioning the use of the FBI to collect presidential records, citing Jackson's ruling and suggesting it was a civil and not criminal matter where deference to Trump is required by law.

On the classification issue, both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama signed executive orders — which remain in force to this day — declaring that presidents have sweeping authority to declassify secrets and do not have to follow the mandatory declassification procedures all other government officials do.

The Jackson ruling and the declassification powers have left some experts worried the FBI raid was heavy-handed under the current laws.

Kevin Brock, former assistant FBI director for intelligence, told Just the News the bureau's search warrant was overly broad and went beyond what the FBI manual for agents recommended. "Specificity is important in order to protect fourth amendment rights from exuberant government overreach designed to find whatever they can," he told Just the News.

Brock added he did not believe DOJ and FBI had authority to criminalize the retention of presidential records.

The warrant "apparently makes a novel legal assertion that any presidential record kept by a former president is against the law," Brock said. "You have to wonder what the other living former presidents think about that. They have the right and, apparently, clear desire to remain silent."

Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch who was on the losing end of the Clinton sock drawer case, said he believes Jackson's ruling could have a profound impact on the coming legal battles over the Trump search.

"The government, the lawyer for the Archives, said, 'You know what? If documents are in the former President's hands, where they're presumptively personal, we just, you know, we presume they're personal,'" Fitton said.

"The Justice Department previously had told us in response to a question about Bill Clinton: 'Tough luck, it's his.' But they changed their mind for Donald Trump?" he asked. "… The law and court decision suggests that Trump is right. And frankly, based on this analysis, Trump should get every single document they took from him back. It's all personal records."

PkrBum wrote:It'd be nice if they could leave the jumbo bottle of meds where I could reach it so I could clear all the shit out of my head forever.

John Solomon (political commentator)

John F. Solomon is an American journalist, and was a contributor to Fox News until late 2020.[1][2][3][4] He was formerly an executive and editor-in-chief at The Washington Times.[5]

Although he won a number of awards (including the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award) for his investigative journalism, in recent years he has been accused of magnifying small scandals, creating fake controversy,[6][7][8] and advancing conspiracy theories.[1][3][9] During the Donald Trump presidency, he advanced Trump-friendly stories including questioning reporting that women who had accused Trump of sexual harassment had also sought payments from partisan political donors[10] and questioning the legitimacy of criminal charges against Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.[11]

He also played an important role in advancing conspiracy theories about unproven allegations of wrongdoing in Ukraine by Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Solomon's stories about the Bidens influenced Trump's fruitless attempt to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into publicly launching an investigation into the elder Biden, an attempt that led to Trump's first impeachment.[4]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Solomon_(political_commentator)

You didn't give a shit when Bill or Hillary took/hid govt records. You dems are pure hypocrites... for partisan political purposes. Sleazy useful idiots.