FBI Search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home May Help Him Politically

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

It’s yet another indication into the topsy-turvy fun house American politics have become in the age of Donald Trump – and let’s face it, even if he no longer (at least for the moment) President we are still living, politically, in the Age of Trump – is that the FBI’s legal execution of a search warrant on Trump’s home and country club, Mar-a-Lago, in south Florida may actually boost his and the Republican Party’s chances of regaining power in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

On August 8, 2022 – 48 years to the day after former President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face near-certain impeachment and removal from office due to his role in the Watergate cover-up – agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched the home of another former President, Donald Trump. Their search warrant authorized them to look for records, including classified documents, created during Trump’s four-year stint as President of the United States and taken by him and his staff to Mar-a-Lago after the new President, Joe Biden, moved in.

Though the news of the Mar-a-Lago search was first broken by blogger Peter Schorsch on his site, Florida Politics, it was soono confirmed by Donald Trump himself. In a statement on his personal social-media outlet, Truth Social, Trump expertly framed the attack on him as a “raid” (a term I used myself in an earlier draft of his article) and accused the Biden administration and the Department of Justice of politicizing the administration of justice just to go after Trump personally.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in his statement. “Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.”

Projection

Ironically, Trump’s self-pitying whine about being the victim of an overtly politicized Department of Justice out to destroy a political enemy is also what Trump complained during his Presidency that he was unable to do. In a November 2, 2017 interview with New York Right-wing talk-radio host Larry O’Connor (https://www.wmal.com/2017/11/03/listen-president-donald-trump-to-larry-oconnor-im-very-unhappy-the-justice-department-isnt-going-after-hillary-clinton/), Trump said, “[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”

One month before the 2020 election, on October 7, Politico reported that Trump had demanded pre-election indictments of Biden, former President Barack Obama, and Trump’s 2016 general election opponent, Hillary Clinton (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/07/trump-demands-barr-arrest-foes-427389). In his first 24 hours since being released from Walter Reed Hospital where he’d been treated for COVID-19, Trump issued several dozen increasingly unhinged tweets. One of them read, “Where are all of the arrests? Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

As the day wore on, Trump’s tweets became even more insane. In one he wrote in all capital letters, Trump said, “DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!” Later, he wrote, again in all caps, “NOW THAT THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS GOT COUGHT [sic] COLD IN THE (NON) FRIENDLY TRANSFER OF GOVERNMENT, IN FACT, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND WENT FOR A COUP, WE ARE ENTITLED TO ASK THE VOTERS FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. PLEASE REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE!”

Though Trump’s distaste for Attorney General Bill Barr reached a boiling point after the election, when Barr gave a press conference announcing that he had investigated Trump’s claims of “massive voter fraud” in the election and found them all bogus, Trump had already started to lose trust in Barr when he refused to issue the politically charged indictments against Biden, Obama and Hillary Clinton before the election. The spectacular reaction Trump had to Barr’s press conference – according to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he literally threw his lunch plate against the White House wall – just added to Trump’s determination to get rid of Barr and install a more complaisant acting Attorney General.

Donald Trump is the sort of crook who believes the rest of the world is just as corrupt as he is – if not more so. That’s the explanation for his extraordinary act of projection: calling the Biden Justice Department unfair to him for doing exactly what he wanted to use his own Justice Department to go after Hillary Clinton over her use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business. Throughout his life, Trump has been able to avoid the consequences that would befall other humans – even other rich, privileged humans – who openly flouted law, custom and reason the way he does routinely. Over and over again, the world has told Donald Trump he doesn’t have to play by the rules everyone else does.

Unsealing the Affidavit: Trump Wins Again!

And Trump got fresh confirmation of that message on Thursday,August 18, 10 days after the FBI search of his home, when Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart – the same judge who signed the search warrant in the first place – signaled his intent to grant Trump’s legal team’s motion to unseal the affidavits the government submitted to him to justify the search (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-orders-portions-mar-lago-search-affidavit-unsealed-rcna43688). Previously the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland had agreed not to oppose the release of the actual warrant and the list of items FBI agents removed from Mar-a-Lago. But both Trump’s lawyers and attorneys for the media – whom Trump has called “enemies of the people” – asked for the actual affidavits.

The Department of Justice opposed the request. Attorney Jay Bratt, representing the department, told Judge Reinhart that the “very detailed and lengthy" document needed to be kept secret because it contains “substantial grand jury” information in a "unique" case with "national security overtones." He also said the government is "very concerned about the safety of the witnesses” in the case whose identities could become compromised if the affidavit is unsealed. Bratt noted that Trump supporters have denounced the FBI and called for defunding it, and last week a Trump supporter and January 6, 2021 participant armed with an assault rifle and a nail gun attacked a Cincinnati FBI building. Bratt called the case “a volatile situation with respect to this particular search, across the political spectrum, but certainly on one side in particular."

But Judge Reinhart said in open court, "I find that on the present record the Government has not met its burden of showing that the entire affidavit should remain sealed. … On my initial careful review ... there are portions of it that can be unsealed.” The judge said he would "give the government a full and fair opportunity” to make cuts – so-called “redactions” – to the document, and ordered them to turn in the cut version next week, along with a legal memo justifying the proposed redactions. He said he would then review the document and either order its release if he agrees with the redactions or hold a closed-door hearing with the government if he disagrees. The judge added that if they can't agree, "obviously I'd win."

Once again, Donald Trump has been told he doesn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. His all too typical self-pitying whine in his initial confirmation of the search, in which he complained that the FBI “even broke into my safe!” as if that were something unusual instead of the normal treatment law-enforcement officials mete out to suspected criminals, is just one more indication of the sense of entitlement Trump has carried with him throughout his life – along with an equal sense of victimization that the world has been totally unfair to him.

When MS-NBC announced Judge Reinhart’s decision on air, the shock among their various panelists – including a defense attorney who’s represented people accused of leaking classified information and a former government prosecutor – that the judge was even considering allowing the release of the affidavits was palpable. The defense attorney said he would love to have that information about the government’s case against one of his clients – and that’s why he’s never received it in any of his cases. But once again, there are the rules everyone else has to abide by – and the special rules for Donald Trump that absolve him of any obligation to law, society or common decency.

Republicans Rally Behind Trump

When MS-NBC’s hosts announced the initial news of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago August 8, they expressed the forlorn hope that this, at last, might be the event that would break Trump’s seemingly impregnable hold on the Republican Party and its leaders. It didn’t take long for that hope to be disappointed once again. Instead, Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere raced each other at near-warp speed to plant their tongues firmly up Trump’s bunghole. “I’ve seen enough,” House of Representatives minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted just hours after Trump confirmed the search. McCarthy said that after the search of Trump’s home, “the Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.” Threatening to investigate the Justice Department if Republicans retake the House in the 2022 midterm elections, McCarthy warned Attorney General Garland to “preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) said, “Hunter Biden skates free while DOJ executes a political plot to destroy lives of political opponents.” Even more explicitly than McCarthy did, Banks threatened a retributory investigation if the Republicans regain a House majority in the midterms. “This is un-American and [a] Jim_Jordan led Judiciary Committee hearings in January can’t come soon enough!,” Banks said. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) tweeted that he wanted to scrutinize the “viability” of federal law enforcement going forward.

Congressmember Bob Good (R-VA) wrote on Twitter: “The continued weaponization of the federal government against its citizens and political opponents continues under the Biden/Garland march toward a police state.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) said, “If you’re a Republican with any kind of voice, and you’re not speaking up for President Trump tonight, don’t expect any of us to speak up for you when your time comes.”

Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Michigan) said, “Last night’s execution of an FBI search warrant at Mar-a-Lago raises grave questions of propriety and politicization.” Meijer’s turnaround is particularly interesting because he was one of 10 Republican Coingressmembers who voted to impeach Trump over the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and he’s already lost his re-election bid when GOP voters in his district nominated a Trump-backed challenger in a primary.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) blamed President Biden personally. His tweet read, “Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent Because one day what goes around is going to come around And then we become Nicaragua under Ortega.”

Matt Rinaldi, chair of the Texas Republican Party, said on Twitter, “Abolish the FBI.” A tweet from the Texas GOP compared the U.S. to a banana republic: “Biden has crossed the Rubicon. If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post-Constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic. It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”

Biden the Biggest Political Loser

Already President Joe Biden has become the biggest political loser from the FBI’s search of Trump’s home. August was supposed to be the month where Biden could boast that he and his often fractious Democratic Party had actually delivered for the American people big-time. Biden and U.S. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer had finally cut a deal with DINO (Democrats-in-name-only) Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginla and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to pass the newly rebranded “Inflation Reduction Act,” a massive investment in combating climate change, improving Americans’ access to health care and ensuring that corporations and individuals making over $1 billion a year pay their faie share in taxes.

The Inflation Reduction Act was the capstone of a month of good Congressional news for Biden and the Democrats. They also passed the CHIPS Act to stimulate American production and manufacture of semiconductor chips, and a bill to give veterans access to health care for illnesses suffered from exposure to toxic “burn pits” and other chemicals in and around military bases. The “burn pits” bill passed despite a last-minute Republican attempt to block it out of spite that Democrats had reached a deal to pass the Inflation Reduction Act.

And earlier in the summer Congress had come together to pass a reasonable gun-safety bill. Yes, it was decades too late and too watered-down to do much of anything to stop the gun violence and mass-shooting deaths that have become all too routine in the U.S. But any crack in the armor the National Rifle Association and fellow members of the “Gun Lobby” had put up against any sensible legislation to make it even infinitesimally harder for Americans to kill each other with guns is good.

With the Democrats holding razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress and the usual rule that the party holding the White House almost always loses in the midterms. And with Biden’s poll numbers sinking below Trump’s at this point in his term – according to current polls, only 40 percent approve of Biden’s performance and 55 percent disapprove – Democrats were hoping for a big boost from these four big legislative achievements to persuade American voters to keep them in control of both houses of Congress and re-elect Biden in 2024.

Instead, they watched helplessly as Donald Trump sucked all the political oxygen out from under them. The cable news channels during the last week and a half – even on MS-NBC,the supposedly “liberal” cable channel – have been all about Trump, all the time. On August 15, virtually all MS-NBC’s coverage was about Trump and the Mar-a-Lago search; the only mention of the Inflation Reduction Act came in a paid commercial put on by the Democratic National Committee.

An August 11 post on the Right-wing Townhall Daily Web site (https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/08/11/poll-americans-are-more-motivated-to-vote-in-midterms-after-fbi-raid-on-trump-n2611610) cites two polls, one from Politico and Morning Consult and the other from Trafalgar in association with the Convention of States Action, to suggest that the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is gonig to motivate voters in the midterms. While at least one of these polls should be read with a grain of salt – the Convention of States Action is a radical-Right group seeking to force the U.S. to hold a new Constitutional convention and write their agenda into our founding document permanently – the message for Democrats is that the Mar-a-Lago search has reinforced the perception of many Republicans and Right-leaning independents that Trump is the victim of ongoing persecution by a sinister “deep state.”

The Midpoint

The news of the Mar-a-Lago search came at the midpoint of a summer largely devoted to speculation about whether Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, would dare to prosecute Trump. Garland’s clear reticence at taking on the former President over his allegedly illegal activities and conduct since he was voted out of office on November 3, 2020, including his increasingly desperate efforts to reverse the outcome and cling to power despite having lost both the popular and the electoral vote.

During June and July 2022, the nine-member House Select Committee on January 6, 2021 held eight nationally televised public hearings on the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on that date and led to a successful delay in the certification of Biden’s victory over Trump. Watching the House Select Committee hearings has been a weird nostalgia trip forme because I can remember the similar hearings nearly 50 years ago before what was officially called the “Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities” but became universally known as the Senate Watergate Committee.

At the time the Senate Watergate Committee hearings started in May 1973, I was 19 years old and was in the process of moving out of my mother’s place into my father’s, mainly because she was dating a man I couldn’t stand, and I remember watching the hearings in my dad’s guest house while sampling some of the Spanish wines he had there. This time I’m 68 years old and once again I’m not working, this time not because I hadn’t had a job yet but because a health crisis brought on by heart disease forced me to retire at 68, at least two years before I wanted to.

It’s been 44 years since I’ve consumed alcohol, and both the country and I are considerably more jaded now. I’ve lived through both Republican and Democratic Presidencies and watched as the country’s governance slowly sank from the level of Richard Nixon – who for all his flaws was genuinely interested in making the country a better place, including signing major legislation to protect the environment and proposing a guaranteed annual income and national health insurance – to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump.

In 1973 the United States was a considerably more innocent place – “innocent” in the sense of “naïve.” Back then it was still shocking to think that a President could lie with impunity (even though it had been during the rule of Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, that the phrase “credibility gap” took hold as a euphemism for “the President ls lying”) and could green-light a campaign to rig the 1972 election to ensure his continued rule. Today just about any amount of duplicity coming from the Oval Office is considered just business as usual, par for the course.

The Republican Party in particular has become an authoritarian cult. They’re aware that their policies don’t have the support of a majority of Americans – in the last eight Presidential elections, Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once (in 2004) – but they’re also aware that they don’t have to. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) said the quiet part out loud at the recent Coinservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) during a discussion about whether the Republican Party should invoke Article V of the Constitution and hold a new Constitutional Convention – which only takes the voters of 34 state legislatures, 19 of which have already passed resolutions calling for just such a convention. According to a leaked recording of Santorum’s speech published by Business Inisider (https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7), the Right would have a huge political advantage at such a convention because the votes would be by states, not by population. As America has become more urbanized, the compromises in the original Constitution and the rules of governance that have evolved have become more and more anti-democratic.

Santorum said at CPAC that because the state-by-state rule gives small states more power than large ones, "we have the opportunity … to have a supermajority, even though … we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with." The ultra-Right faction that dominates today’s Republican Party regards democracy as a troublesome impediment to fulfilling their political agenda – as they proved when CPAC invited Viktor Orban, dictatorial prime minister of Hungary, to speak at their convention and offer them a road map for destroying democracy.

The current authoritarian streak of the Republican Party long predates Donald Trump. Indeed, Karl Rove, principal strategic advisor to the last Republican President before Trump, George W. Bush, said his goal was to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” so the Republican Party would be the only one that mattered. But one of the things Trump did that endeared him to the Republican base was to express openly the contempt for democracy they had nursed privately for decades. During the 2016 Presidential campaign Trump openly urged supporters to beat up people in the audience who dared to heckle him, and pledged to fund their legal defense if they were arrested for doing so.

Once he became President, he started his administration with a flurry of executive orders, all encased in snazzy brown folders and signed with a flourish of his Sharpie, in what Trump advisor Steve Bannon (pardoned by Trump after he ran a scam that fleeced money from Trump supporters, ostensibly to build the border wall with Mexico but really to line Bannon’s pockets) called the “new sheriff in town” strategy. When then-FBI director James Comey – whose handling of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal had done much to get Trump elected – refused Trump’s demand for a pledge of “loyalty” to Trump personally, reminiscent of the “Führer oath” Adolf Hitler similarly demanded of his people, Trump fired him. The next day, in the Oval Office, he boasted to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that by canning Comey he had put an end to the Justice Department’s investigation of whether Trump had received illegal help from Russia to get elected.

Throughout the Trump administration, he was forever demanding similar pledges of “loyalty” – not to the Constitution or the rule of law, but to Trump personally. He also revived the practice Hitler and the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, meaning appointing people to run key agencies who didn’t believe in what those agencies were supposed to do. (For more information, please visit my July 2020 post on Trhum’s Cleichschaltung, see https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/07/trumps-gleichschaltung-kills-people.html.)

In a special report aired on Friday, July 29 – 11 days before the searh at Mar-a-Lago – MS-NBC legal correspondent Ari Melber laid out in detail Trump’s eight-part plan to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and remain in power despite having lost the popular and the electoral votes. Some were legal, like filing lawsuits in court – even though Trump lost all but one of the lawsuits, and many of the judges threw them out of court because there were lots of conjectures in the pleadings but no real facts or evidence, Some were dubiously legal, like naming alternative slates of “Trump electors” in states Biden won – which would have been O.K. if they were presented as electors who would have voted if the court challenges reversed the outcome.

Other parts of the Trump schemes were frankly illegal. He wanted to get either the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines, ostensibly to study the software that ran them for evidence of electronic “fraud” that had allegedly taken votes away from Trump and given them to Biden. His supporters organized the fake “electors” to cast votes for President and Vice-President in the state capitols, just like the real Biden electors were doing. He sent his roving attorney Rudolph Giuliani, and others to speak before state legislators to get them to reverse the election results and award their votes to Trump, not Biden.

And Trump’s campaign went farther than that. He and his legal consultant, John Eastman, tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to allow certain states’ electors to be counted. Pence consulted with various authorities, including former federal judge Muchael Luttig and Dan Quayle, George H. W. Bush’s vice-president and the last Republican who had had to certify a Democrat’s win in a Presidential election to succeed him, who told him the Constitution had no such power.

When all else failed – when Trump was unable to get the military, the Justice Department, state legislators, Congress or Mike Pence to steal the election for him – Trump sent out the now-infamous tweet on December 19, 2020 urging his supporters to come to the Ellipse on Washington, D.C for a rally, which he promised “will be Wild!” When he got to the Ellipse he found that many of his supporters were being turned away because they were carrying guns, including assault rifles. Trump found out about this and issued an order to the Secret Service to “take the fucking mags away” – “mags” being short for “magnetometers,” the metai detectors used to search people for weapons.

It’s standard practice for the Secret Service to not let people with guns in the vicinity of the President. That’s what their “protection details” are supposed to be about. But Trump would have none of it. He told the skeptical people in charge of his Secret Service detail to let people with guns into his event because “they’re not there to hurt me.” At the Ellipse speech he issued a seemingly spontaneous but really carefully planned call for a march on the Capitol, and added, “I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness.”

Trump didn’t make it to the Capitol that day, and until the January 6 committee hearings I had assumed that he never planned to: that this was just another bit of Trump bravado, making himself seem more courageous than he really is. When the hearings took place, we heard that Trump very much wanted to go to the Capitol that day. He even, according to Cassidy Hutchinson (who admitted she did not personally witness this but had heard about it from someone who’d been there), tried to wrestle the steering wheel of his car away from the Secret Service agent who refused to drive him to the Capitol on the grounds that he wouldn’t be safe there.

The moment I heard Cassidy Hutchinson tell that story, my immediate thought was, “March on Rome.” The March on Rome occurred on October 29, 1922 and was Benito Mussolini’s successful coup d’état to end Italy’s government as a British-style constitutional monarchy and establish himself as dictator. It really does seem as if Trump relished the spectacle of himself at the head of an armed mob, holding guns at the heads of Senators and Representatives and demanding to be made dictator of the U.S. And while Mussolini’s coup was bloodless, if Trump had had to get Congress to declare him President for life over the dead bodies of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, he wouldn’t have minded at all. When Trump heard the mob he had summoned to Washington, D.C. was chanting “Hang Mike Pence!,” he told at least one advisor in the White House dining room that because Pence had refused to go along with Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election result, maybe he should be hanged.

On his special report, Ari Melber quoted historian and blogger Doug Porter as saying, “If Trump’s coup attempt goes unpunished, it will become a training exercise.” We have already seen inthe hysterical overreaction on the part of the American Right to a legal and routine search of Donald Trump’s home looking for documents he wasn’t supposed to have – including classified documents whose disclosure could threaten the national security – just how deep the authoritarian streak in this country is.

And we have seen the bizarre loyalty to Trump many otherwise thoughtful Americans have adopted – including the 11 relatives of retiring Congressmember Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) who wrote him in the name of their shared “Christian values” that his opposition to Trump was literally opposition to God – and the death threats officials ranging fron FBI agents and judges to election workers have faced simply for doing their jobs and saying no to the Trump juggernaut. The United States has been a republic for quite a long time – almost 250 years – but it will take a lot of struggle both within and outside the electoral system for us to remain one.