The FBI executes a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Florida residence — Mar-a-Lago — to find presidential papers which may belong in the National Archives. Many on the political right call it an unprecedented raid and say it crosses a constitutional and civil line from which there’s no going back.
[NOTE: We apologize for the quality of Bill Whittle’s audio, and recommend you turn him up to 11.]
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43 replies on “FBI Executes Search Warrant for Trump’s Presidential Papers at Mar-a-Lago”
It just occurred to me that they may be going after non existent classified documents for an even crazier reason. If Trump handed everything over including stuff that confirms the wilder Q from 4Chan claims and other heterodox foreign and local intelligence, then the Biden White House may have disbelieved the claim. They think they received false foreign intelligence reports and Trump retained the real ones. They are looking for things that are not real. I.E. If Kim Jong Un was not the dictator in north Korea and accepted Trumps offer of liberty but it’s implementation can’t be public and requires south Korean political change too. This has been my premise for years now. Would it be believed by the Biden State department? What evidence of nuclear weapons and atrocities would they be looking for? If Jamal khashoggi was the real king pin of Al Qaeda/ ISIS would the left believe it. If Trump handed over intel that the left cant believe then they would assume that the intel confirming their world view is in a safe at Mar a Lago.
If you ever played the game of hearts, you may be saying “hearts has been broken”. That’s Bill’s contention, and perhaps he’s right.
And as far as Scott’s comments- is he a closet leftist? WHO CARES what they found? It is the very act undertaken that scares the rest of us.
I suspect the following:
With this sort of crap in August, I wonder what they have planned for October.
Statutes in some jurisdictions may require officers to show or furnish a copy of the warrant to an occupant upon entry; however, this is not constitutionally required. The Supreme Court has twice rejected imposing any such steps under the Fourth Amendment. “Neither the Fourth Amendment nor the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure requires the executing officer to serve the warrant on the owner before commencing the search.” (Groh v. Ramirez; U.S. v. Grubbs)
And yet the judge ordered the DOJ to provide the plaintiff with a copy of the warrant. I suspect that the judge was doing the DOJ a favor. Refusal to provide President Trump or his representative with a copy is bad optics. After all, the search easily could be construed as political posturing to influence the coming midterm elections.
However, IMHO, there is something even more important at play here.
Consider the following scene from the play “A Man for All Seasons” in which the enemies of Sir Thomas More have enlisted Richard Rich, an ambitious your courtier, to bear false witness against More. Rich appeals to More to help him achieve a position in the court of Henry VIII. More refuses, and his family attempts to persuade More to imprison Rich.
ALICE MORE: Arrest him!
SIR THOMAS MORE: For what?
ALICE: He’s dangerous!
WILLIAM ROPER: For libel, he’s a spy!
MARGARET MORE: Father, that man’s bad.
MORE: There is no law against that.
ROPER: There is! God’s law!
MORE: Then God can arrest him.
ALICE: While you talk, he’s gone!
MORE: And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
ROPER: So! Now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: Yes! I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Is Trump “The Devil”? His enemies believe he is, and they are obviously willing to cut down every law to get him. They have lied (the Steele Dossier) and may well have cheated (2020 election). They have weaponized federal agencies including the IRS (decertify nonprofits who disagree with their political agenda) and the DOJ to conduct fishing expeditions in search of a crime. (Search warrants are only supposed to be used to procure evidence of a known crime.)
Again, IMHO, this search was just another desperate act by desperate people. Fearful people. They fear the wrath of the American voter as well they should. If it weren’t for the fact that the popular cultural and news media are flying cover for them, their fate would be certain. As it is, they may escape retribution if the propaganda is effective and a sufficient number of Americans remain duped.
Further proof that the members at BW(dot)com skew to the right side of the curve.
An excellent example. And nearly as old as I am.
From a time when respect for the law was losing it panache in that particular decade.
Thanks for posting this.
Also, Robert Shaw, great actor.
I understand Scott’s point that we don’t have all the information and can’t make an informed judgement on why this action was taken. Fair enough. The problem with our current administration and the government as a whole in today’s world, is that they don’t feel the need to justify their actions to the people. It’s largely an unaccountable bureaucracy running the show. When Scott says that the FBI owes an explanation to the people, I don’t think they agree. And I also don’t know if I’ll believe what they eventually tell us, because their actions when it comes to President Trump, and conservatives in general, have been sketchy to say the least. The FBI posing as regular citizens to stir up trouble has been exposed in numerous situations, to the point where it’s a meme. I’m very cynical lately about our “ruling class” and their law enforcement arms.
It gets worse Giuliani says the padlock they cut was an FBI padlock and they did not have the keys. This means that essentially the FBI was breaking into a secured FBI evidence room at Mar a Lago and taking the evidence that another FBI team, the real one working the document case for the national archive, was sorting through. The fact that the FBI/ nat’l archives was on site for weeks working though the documents, which is apparently something that is routine for most Presidents, means that Garland did not trust the team doing the work and kept them in the dark or they refused to hand over the padlock key. The FBI raided the FBI at Mar a Lago. Trump is out of the chain of custody.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2022/08/10/does-the-fbi-always-raid-homes-they-visited-a-few-weeks-ago-n1619955
https://rumble.com/v1fcixd-fbi-raids-donald-trump-this-means-war-louder-with-crowder.html At 1.10
Who knew Max Sennett took over the FBI?
The most plausible explanation I’ve heard isn’t that the FBI were worried that Trump may have destroyed documents, but rather he had documents the FBI wants destroyed.
Is anymore proof required to show that we now live in a banana republic??? America was assassinated/euthanized on 11/4/2020, embalmed on 1/6/2021, and buried on 1/20/2021. America has been overrun and fallen to the sewer rat Leftist vermin. I strongly doubt that they will even permit the midterm elections to take place, much less a 2024 election. These conscienceless scums are capable of ANYTHING, and enabled by their main-swine-media monolith lapdogs. (BTW, Jesus was only harsh with people who had no clue that they were sinners. In the musical “1776,” Jefferson says, “George IS a tyrant. We might as well say so.”)
One disagreement with Steve, the Demonrat scum’s FURTHER weaponization of the IRS is designed to “put the fear of Satan,” not God, into the DECENT people.
Maybe I have been watchin g too many thrillers, but I can’t help thinking that the “urgency” arose for a needed distraction.
I wonder what we didn’t hear about the last few days because everyone was going wall-to-wall with coverage of this.
Two questions:
1) Why is the search warrant sealed?
2) Why do we need 87,000 new IRS agents that are now armed to the teeth?
This is all according to plan and straight out of the communist playbook. Demonize your opposition, and in so doing, demonize their supporters. If that doesn’t work, prosecute or execute them.
They refused to let Trump’s attorneys witness the search. They instructed that all security cameras be turned off. Based on what I read this morning, the Mar-A-Lago employees refused to comply and left them on. Hopefully, those videos will be released soon.
I now fear for Trump’s life. If they are unable to manufacture a crime out of these documents, or fail at planting something, the only other recourse they have is assassination.
It’s simple… had Trump been allowed to turn over documents through an organized process, a record would have been made of all documents transferred. When the FBI forcefully ‘takes’ documents, anything can be added to those documents after the fact. ‘My oh my, look what we found in what we confiscated from Trump!’
The only question that NEEDS to be asked is why Trump, but not the professional politician who, on LIVE TV, in front of the WHOLE WORLD, destroyed other documents protected by the same laws – President Trump’s SCOTUS speech?
Most likely that Trump had incriminating evidence against someone or “someones.” IF that’s the case, it will never be revealed.
This is certainly possible, but not likely. They’ve been scrutinizing and subpoenaing the Trump family and DJT for years. Trump’s been at least two steps ahead in every case.
Let’s say he was actually in possession of damning evidence against a rival, the FBI, or whoever. If you’re DJT, you don’t trust anyone and leave it sitting around where inside traitors or raiders can get it. You leak just enough information to set the mole in motion and watch the charade. The vault was empty, we hear. Any incriminating evidence he may theoretically have certainly wouldn’t be in an obvious place.
I think the marxist cabal has been punked and the hand they’ve forced will spectacularly backfire when the Donald plays his.
One aspect of the search that I am surprised the Right Angle Guys didn’t mention is, given the fact that a search warrant must describe the item or items that are being searched for, why were the agents taking papers indiscriminately, without even looking at them? That is no way to run a search warrant.
Something very incrementing to democrats is missing
There are just so many things wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll start with this one …
It may have been a fishing expedition.
In the matter of warrants the thing being searched for must be described and only the likely places to find that thing described are allowed to be searched. For instance, if the warrant is for an intact dead elephant you can’t open desk drawers to search because there is no way you’ll find a dead elephant in a desk drawer.
On the other hand, if in legally searching for that specific thing named in the warrant yields some other evidence of a crime coincidentally discovered in the legal process of the search it can be used as evidence in prosecuting a new crime. An example of this would be a warrant for stolen jewelry and when the agent/officer opened a large jewelry box it was jammed full of uncut packages of cocaine. In that instance the charge for cocaine possession with intent to distribute would stick like white on rice.
(Just to make this whole thing even less clear, if the warrant were for stolen jewelry and the agents/officers entered the premises and discovered an intact dead African elephant illegally imported and killed lying on the living room floor they could arrest and prosecute on that too. It’s a little bit convoluted but there are rules that at least need the appearance of being adhered to.)
Think about this a bit and you’ll realize that this has to work this way. If the warrant was for a stolen motorcycle, a garage would be a likely place to search. If on entering the garage looking for a motorcycle a dead body is discovered laying on the floor the perp doesn’t get away with murder just because the agents/officers were looking for a motorcycle.
My point here is that while the warrant may have been for a specific thing, in this case documents claimed by the National Archive, any other documents that were seized that when examined yield evidence of another crime — That evidence is also fully admissible and the crime prosecutable on the strength of that coincidental evidence.
The point I’m making about a fishing expedition is that the government may have had suspicion of another prosecutable crime but didn’t have evidence sufficient to get even a friendly Judge to issue a warrant. In which case the National Archive wanting its documents may have been nothing more than a plausible excuse that a Judge would issue a warrant for and they’re really looking for something else they think they’ll find in the documents seized.
We’ll know that’s the case if all of a sudden some other charges proceed from the fruits of this warrant.
This also explains a search and seizure operation being carried out when it seems the target of the warrant was being fully cooperative and on the surface there should be no need for a search warrant.
That all seems a distinct possibility because there may be things revealed in the seized documents that while normally would be ignored under the circumstances will nonetheless be used to charge Donald Trump with a crime. And also as Steve pointed out in the video the laws have become so obscure and convoluted that it’s quite easy to break one unknowingly.
I actually agree with nearly all of what ACTS has written. Added some great perspective to the events and the possible “why”. The one thing he noted was “rules that at least have the appearance of being adhered to”. Rules? Immediately reminded me of this scene from one of my favorite movies as a kid.
Lol … If there aren’t going to be any rules let’s get the fight started. Someone say 1,2,3, GO!
I saw that in the theater with my Mom, Dad and little sister. During the love scene between Etta Place and Sundance I heard my sister whisper “Momma, are they married?”
One among many things that are causing me anxiety for the future of The Republic is “… if there aren’t going to be any rules …” that you’re pointing out.
The rules have always gotten bent now and then in good faith for a right cause. A judge would look the other way on a Miranda flub, a cop would pull over a suspected drunk who wasn’t quite making the cut for probable cause by claiming he threw trash or a cigarette butt out the window. If the driver was sober the cop would just say “It must have been the car in front of you, you’re free to go.” Etc. Mostly minor abuses where the intent was justice in spirit when the technical letter of the law caused a hiccup. If someone went too far the perp skated away with a smile on his face.
If the people empowered by the State no longer worry about even the appearance of following the rules this is a clear symptom of deeper, more serious trouble. The difference between good guys and bad guys is the good guys follow the rules and the bad guys do not. When the good guys stop following the rules they’re not the good guys anymore. When they don’t even feel the need to appear to follow the rules the rot runs deep.
Ron DeSantis was just recently forced to suspend Tampa’s top State Attorney, a prosecutor, for not following the rules. That’s a pretty big bad guy. DeSantis may not have had clear legal grounds to suspend this weasel … Which raises questions of DeSantis following the rules too.
We don’t want anybody in power not following the rules. I like DeSantis and I don’t like Andrew Warren, the guy he suspended. Who I like doesn’t matter. I’m not on any side but the side of the Rule of Law …
We in the United States are not ruled by a king or a queen or any mortal human being. Despite what Democrats seem to think (only when there’s a Democrat in the White House) not even our President has that kind of power. We do not live under the rule of any person, we live under the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law supplants the need for a powerful, hegemonic individual. The Rule of Law even severely limits the power of the most powerful man in our government, the POTUS. He is as much a subject of the Rule of Law as any of the rest of us. At least in theory and intent.
If that changes and we are no longer subjects of our own laws then we will become vassals of a human ruler or rulers. There is no way around this fact. The alternative is chaos and out of chaos will rise a ruler be that a human being, a cabal of human beings or The Law. In any possible scenario, order will be restored either through elected representatives or an iron boot on our throats.
The Democrat Party wants very badly to become that cabal of human beings and if they succeed there is a very strong probability that one person will rise to the top, seize ultimate power and claim to benignly rule over the rest of us “for our own good”. That’s not me looking in my crystal ball and making a prediction based on opinion, that’s what has historically always happened.
We have a basic foundational set of secular rules we call the U.S. Constitution. It has provisions for a mechanism to change the rules if three quarters of the people agree on the modification. This has been done 33 times. The proof that it is a workable system is that it works. In fact, if those mechanisms are used successfully almost anything in that set of rules can be added to, modified or nullified. Theoretically if you can get enough people to agree to it you can throw out the entire document and start over from scratch using the mechanisms prescribed in that very document.
Therefore there is no need for a revolution, rebellion, coup or any of the other means by which a new government might be installed. It’s “easy”, all you have to do is get a quorum of 3/4’s of the voting population to agree with you.
In the United States a coup may not be something that appears to overthrow our government. It can as easily be something that overthrows the Rule of Law giving control of governmental power to the coup’s faction. The government then looks the same externally but is a completely different critter in practice internally. This is the gravest threat to our Republic because it will still appear to be a Republic while in practice it is anything but.
I’m fairly certain this is what is being attempted right now and what we’re seeing is not the disease but its symptoms. This didn’t start with Biden or Obama, it’s been happening for decades.
That’s not a matter of insight or prescience BTW, our Republic has always been under such threats. If this one succeeds the Republic will fall. If it does not there will be another threat along shortly and the process starts all over again.
1 2 3 Go! Umpph!
Fabulous, one of my favorite movies, if not necessarily historically accurate.
I do have a conundrum relative to the stars of this particular movie.
I found out quite recently that Mrs Ron has never seen The Sting. I am unsure as to whether this requires my seeking an attorney, or just remedying the situation at the earliest possible time and staving off the call on an attorney until I see if she likes it.
What do you think?
The following is the Road Rider Acid Test:
The Sting? No
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ________
All The President’s Men__________
Her answers will dictate the call to the lawyers or to keep her. Just sayin
I know that she has seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and thoroughly enjoyed it. Going to give her the benefit of the doubt and being a girly girl, and too young when it came out to see it, that she will enjoy the sting.
As for that other, nope she wouldn’t like it. So I may be good. Let you know after we watch the great con.
After my buddy and I went to the local movie theater to watch the combo of Butch and James Garner in Support your Local Sheriff – 23 times one summer – we could recite nearly nearly every line of dialog of both movies. So after being totally hyped up on westerns as a 13 year old kid, The Sting was a huge disappointment for me. Kind of like getting hooked on Han Solo, then later getting force fed ……Ewoks! Ugh.
Love both Support your local sheriff and local gunfighter. I mean, Suzanne Pleschette, yes please.
I actually find The Sting to be a movie that I enjoy more now than I did in the 70s.
Lot’s of dialog details that I didn’t pick up on when I was a kid.
I always thought Clooney’s Ocean’s movies were more ode to the sting than they were the Rat Pack movies.
And, Robert Shaw. I love Robert Shaw in pretty much anything he has been in.
We watched the original Taking of Pelham 123 several months back; really enjoyed that. Shaw and Matthau, really nice. Two good actors with their share of personal foibles, but when they were good they were good.
I’d be most grateful ir the FBI would come over and clean our my basement. Until today, I was not aware that they offer this service.
If true, it might be the most useful thing our tax dollars ever paid for!
Bill, you simply have to do something about your audio. You sound just awful. Tinny, muddy, unclear and in an echo chamber. Steve and Scott sound just fine, but your audio production values are off the chart on the bad side!
He’s using his tin-can-and-string microphone these days.
Sorry, Scott, I don’t foresee any useful investigation from the Feds about this or any other abomination. There’s too much of a “Code of Silence” vibe, regardless of which party is in power. Sigh.
Scott obviously “dislikes” our 45th President and, I think, is very biased !!!! Very disappointed in his weak response.
It appears from his past comments that Scott has disliked President Trump for a very long time, so that is nothing new. I realized it a few years ago. Always giving President Trump the razzberries.
A person in search of a crime, not a crime in search of a person. They had better be dragging out a dead body out…..if not…..
I have a friend who went to school with someone in the Secret Service. He told him that there was someone associated with Trump who was forced to testify before the Jan. 6th Committee.
Before the Committee, he insinuated that he had more damaging information on Trump but that he would only tell it on a closed door meeting with the FBI.
At that meeting, he informed the FBI that Trump had classified documents at his home in Mar Lago that would indict Trump.
And that these were the documents the FBI was searching for…
(What was not known was that this Trump associate who was forced to testify was a plant by President Trump to get the FBI and, by association, the entire Executive branch, to perform an outrageous criminal act on a former President!!!!)
And… the above is a total fabrication on my part that I expect to go viral… 🤯
I wonder when the Fibbie’s will be knocking on MY door! 🤫🥸I have a friend who went to school with someone in the Secret Service. He told him that there was someone associated with Trump who was forced to testify before the Jan. 6th Committee.
Before the Committee, he insinuated that he had more damaging information on Trump but that he would only tell it on a closed door meeting with the FBI.
At that meeting, he informed the FBI that Trump had classified documents at his home in Mar Lago that would indict Trump.
And that these were the documents the FBI was searching for…
(What was not known was that this Trump associate who was forced to testify was a plant by President Trump to get the FBI and, by association, the entire Executive branch, to perform an outrageous criminal act on a former President!!!!)
And… the above is a total fabrication on my part that I expect to go viral… 🤯
I wonder when the Fibbie’s will be knocking on MY door! 🤫🥸
President Trump invited the FBI down to Mar-a-Lago in June, and they sent agents to go through the boxes. The boxes were in a locked room in the basement. He even spoke with the agents personally. There was absolutely no sense of urgency. Raid was completely unwarranted. Reported I believe by Harmeet Dhillon after speaking with Trump’s attorneys who had already been cooperating with the FBI.
Not only did federal magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart defend Jeffrey Epstein’s associates, he left the team of prosecutors in the Epstein case to do so.
When nothing comes of this, our objective press who, as we know, doesn’t take sides, will proclaim not that he’s innocent but that he eluded capture once again and that he probably destroyed evidence.
After that he’ll be forever referred to as having been ‘credibly accused’ which is how they frequently refer to Kavanaugh.
When are we going to call a spade a spade? Democrats are communists.
* Censorship through Big Tech and Hunter Biden’s laptop story suppressed by MSM. * Propaganda through fake news. * Destroy Senate filibuster and eliminate electoral college so no minority voice. * Pack the Supreme Court by ADDING justices who will ignore the Constitution and decide in their favor. * Disarm the public. * Hate speech as they determine it not free speech. * Hate crimes as they determine it (Arbery defendants just received life…anyone prove their racism? How about Derek Chauvin’s racism? No proof there either. Even if there were, did it cause either to kill Arbery/Floyd?). * Inflating the currency as Lenin suggested. * Using climate change for fear as Marx suggested w/ global cooling. * Indoctrinating children to hate America with communist Howard Zinn Education Project. * Grooming children. * Marxist CRT and gender theory in schools they control. * Rigging elections. * Weaponized the justice system against political opponents. * Demonized Trump and his supporters as white supremacists as the Bolsheviks demonized the Kulaks. * Open border like the Cloward-Piven strategy * Backed by Soros who said capitalism not communism is the threat * Seeking new world order * Biden working with the CCP * CCP giving $400 million to Dominion’s parent company Paragon * RINO’s as controlled opposition. * Violent Antifa intimidating political opponents while they bail them out of jail.
Stop giving these communists the benefit of the doubt. What more evidence do people need to start saying it?!
Stop giving these communists the benefit of the doubt.
The Dems continue to shoot themselves in the foot, now having blown away flesh all the way up the ankles and into the knees, yet they still have media covering for them and over half the population voting for them. Here in Georgia, Warnock (D) is way ahead of Walker (R) for the senate seat. Warnock is a smooth, slick “used car salesman”, preacher used to talking in public. Herschel Walker is a “Paul Bunyon-esque” figure in Georgia, but is anything but slick. The Republicans couldn’t have more on the Dems to use against them in elections, but are failing at getting the voters to wake up and throw the bums out. Their excuse seems to be that they are being out-spent. I think that they are being outwitted.
Hillary was the odds on favorite by a comfortable margin in the Clinton/Trump race and she had financial resources that were multiples of what Trump had. So we’ve seen a very, very crucial race won not by money but by strategy and wits that belies the “they outspent me” excuse.
That said, Hillary like Warnock was also the darling of the pollsters so I don’t know if you can really trust the polling you’re seeing. Or any polling for that matter.
I hope those things are not gone for good.
Because if “now this happened” and it will happen again and again from here on out … we’re far past 50% toward Banana Republic.
He’s had 18 months to shred them … seems like if he wanted them shredded, they’d be shredded by now.
I find it a matter of concern that the number of “cartons of documents” turned over earlier and the number of cartons seized seem to be very close in numbers.
The reason that’s concerning is that what was seized might have been the same documents turned over earlier. They may have been “cover your ass” copies that Trump kept for a contingency supporting a possible future defense.
Which he now no longer has in his possession unless he has another duplicate of those documents stashed somewhere else.
I don’t know what the law would be regarding such duplicates but we all know the POTUS can de-classify anything he likes. He alone has that broadly applicable discretion.
I’ll say more along those lines in my own comment.