The FBI raided the Florida home at Mar-a-Lago of former President Donald Trump this week. They based their raid on the purported rationale that they suspected Trump of having mishandled classified information, taking home materials meant for the National Archives: according to The New York Times, the search “appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago… Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents.”
Trump quickly responded with outrage: “After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. Such an attack could only occur in Third-World, broken countries. They even broke into my safe!”
We have not yet seen either the warrant for raid, the warrant application, or the underlying evidence. Obviously, the FBI head and Department of Justice head, Attorney General Merrick Galrland, would have to sign off on the raid.
And, to put it mildly, the basis for such a raid—a raid authorized by a current presidential administration on the leader of the prior administration and front-runner for the nomination in 2024—seems extraordinarily weak.
In 2015, former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger only received a misdemeanor charge for stuffing classified documents down his pants; in 2016, the FBI investigated Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails but certainly never raided her home or offices, despite finding that it was “possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” complete with access to classified information.
Trump, on the other hand, was President—which means he had plenary authority to declassify any document. Trump was the one who was raided.
The most serious questions about political legitimacy will be raised if the raid’s basis is anything other than solid bedrock. This amounts to the current administration authorizing the raid on the head the prior administration; it seems to center on a matter that is unrelated to the events surrounding Jan. 6th and the aftermath of 2020. It seems pretextual. We won’t know whether it is or isn’t until we see the underlying documentation.
The clamor for such documentation is rightly going to be louder if there isn’t the kind of trust that the FBI has failed in cultivating over the past few decades.
Given the FBI’s behavior over the past few years, there are no doubts that suspicions are warranted. The FBI spent years running a deep investigation on Trump’s campaign and presidency, based on speculative nonsense compiled by the Clinton campaign in the form of the so-called Steele dossier. FBI Director James Comey presented Trump with the dossier, even though there was no evidence that the dossier had support. It is no surprise that only 45% of independents and 39% among Republicans said they trust the FBI most or all the time in 2018, despite not having any evidence.
The FBI raid on Trump could easily be yet another inflection point in the complete breakdown of America’s public institutions. Every “I” must be dotted and “t” crossed—and there must be tangible results. Anything less than that will lead to a serious political crisis.
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