Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Garland Calls Trump Bluff over Warrant Release
Donald Trump is not much of a stategist. That requires forward thinking and planning, and the ex-president and failed casino owner has trouble thinking beyond today. So, when he began demanding, via his minions, that the Department of Justice release the search warrant the FBI executed at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Attorney-General Merrick Garland agreed to do so. He filed a motion in court to unseal the document, making it available to the public. However, that meant the judge would give Mr. Trump an opportunity to object. Mr. Garland had called Mr. Trump\'s bluff, and Mr. Trump has no hand to play.
AG Garland tried, as per DoJ rules, to get Mr. Trump to cooperate with the return of documents that should never have left the White House. They were neither the property of the ex-president, nor were they documents that could be safely disclosed to the public on national security grounds. The DoJ negotiated with the Trump legal team, but after some documents got back to the government, talk broke down. The DoJ believed their counterparts were not being honest and forth coming. So, the DoJ got a subpoena to force the return of the documents. That happened in June. The documents stayed in Florida.
When the FBI executed the search warrant on Monday, they did so without the standard blue wind-breakers with FBI in yellow on the back. They worked during regular business hours and informed the Secret Service at Mar-a-Lago that they were coming almost an hour before they arrived. It was going to be done very discretely. Then, Mr. Trump decided to announce it on his website.
The right has been having kittens ever since. They have blamed the FBI for going rogue; they have claimed there were no such documents; they have claimed that the former president declassified everything so there was no reason to get them back. None of this is true, of course.
Their biggest demand was that the DoJ release the warrants. The wager was that the insitutionalist Mr. Garland would stick to the rules and let the court filings to his talking. What they did not take into consideration was that, by opening his big yap, Mr. Trump gave Mr. Garland the opportunity to set the record straight on an investigation someone else (Mr. Trump) made public. It took him about 4 minutes at a press conference yesterday afternoon for Mr. Garland to handle that.
By having the DoJ request the unsealing of the warrant, Mr. Garland stuck Mr. Trump on the horns of a nasty dilemma. If Mr. Trump did not object to the release, the document would come out and reveal exactly what the DoJ took and under what law they did so (which would include criminal activity). If he objected, it would be clear he was hiding something. He opted to let the release go ahead hoping the damage would be less awful for him than objecting.
Trump world is in desperate spin-control mode. They have admitted that there were classified documents in Mar-a-Lago. They will now try to claim it was no big deal. That is a lie. It is a big damn deal.
When President Eisenhower wanted to consult classified documents to help him with his memoirs, he had to travel to a secure location on a US Army base. While he would have prefered to write and research on his farm, he did not. Whatever purpose Mr. Trump had for having these documents at Mar-a-Lago, they should never have been there.
One merely wonders how much of the information is now common knowledge among those who work in Dzerzhinsky Square.
© Copyright 2022 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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