Pursuant to court order, at noon today, the Department of Justice released the famous affidavit, which delineates the legal justification for the unprecedented search the FBI conducted earlier this month at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
But nobody is happier than Trump that everyone in the media is busy chasing the redacted information (aka the shiny ball) that led to this search. Because this means nobody is chasing him for information about why he was hording national secrets at his estate in the first place.
The redacted affidavit is a total of 32 pages with an attachment, including a May 25 letter signed by former President Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran outlining what is described as Trump’s authorities regarding presidential records. The unredacted portions of the affidavit put on display the timeline of the Justice Department’s investigation leading up to its unprecedented move to search the residence of a former president.
It was kicked off, according to the affidavit, after a special agent for the National Archives’ inspector general sent a criminal referral to DOJ revealing that the 15 boxes handed over by Trump’s team in January revealed “highly classified records” intermingled with otherwise innocuous documents.
The affidavit goes on to outline further interactions between NARA and Trump’s team to secure the return of records that were improperly taken from the White House.
(ABC News, August 26, 2022)
Blah, blah, blah…
Missing the forest for the trees…
Frankly, nothing was more disheartening than flipping through cable news channels this afternoon and seeing anchors and reporters alike flipping through that (redacted) affidavit like bloodhounds sniffing for dead bodies.
After all, the whole world watched Trump throw the US intelligence community under the bus to side with Vladimir Putin … just to protect his own ego. So why is everyone in the media wasting time with idle speculation about what the DOJ has hidden in this redacted affidavit?
I mean, there they were, like Trump’s Pavlovian dogs, chasing after his latest shiny ball… Whereas they should be hounding Trump (and his MAGA defenders) to explain what he did with our national secrets during the year he willfully stonewalled government efforts to retrieve them.
Most notably, they should be asking this treasonous insurrectionist if he has shared or sold any of America’s nuclear secrets to his bloodthirsty pal MbS of Saudi Arabia, or to his lover Kim of North Korea.
Meanwhile, I hope the American people realize that, the Republican Party has become such a Trumpian cult, its leaders are blithely accusing the FBI of behaving like Nazis. Whereas all the FBI is doing is preventing Trump from behaving like Hitler.