The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago had already produced some bizarre Republican responses when I blogged about it last week. They’re not getting better, possibly because the case against Trump is getting worse. What was he doing with classified nuclear documents or possibly information identifying intelligence sources.
It’s no surprise Trump is freaking out. It’s what he always does whenever he’s challenged, balked or criticized. But as his handling of declassified documents could violate the Espionage Act, the right wing has suddenly decided the act is bad. As noted at the link, that’s true in general — it’s the default law for prosecuting whistle-blowers — but Trump wasn’t blowing the whistle or releasing the Pentagon Papers (one comparison some Repubs are making). Nevertheless, Rand Paul wants the act killed. Other right-wigers want FBI agents killed.
Florida State Rep. Anthony Sabatini, who’s running for the federal House, thinks state law-enforcement should arrest FBI agents and other federal law enforcement officers if they’re acting against Trump. Breitbart doxxed two FBI agents involved in the raid. Remember when Republicans were so loud and proud about how they backed the blue? Now it’s defund the FBI — though as Zeeshan Aleem says, they’re lying when they pretend to care about the FBI’s history of bad behavior (see here). Don’t be fooled: if the search was the political persecution they pretend it is, but directed at A-OC or Rashida Tlaib, they’d be cheering.
Heck, they’re already cheering in advance: Charlie Kirk and Eric Metaxas are demanding right-wing state attorneys general raid liberals to pay them back and warn them away from pushing Trump: “State attorney generals that are Republican have to authorize raids against Soros groups, BLM, Planned Parenthood, the alphabet mafia, groomers, the chemical castration of children now! Here’s why—a hundred facilities should be raided by next week” even without a legal pretext (given the current Repub mindset, I’m assuming groomers means teachers not religious conservatives).
Right-wing pundit Mark Levin scraped the barrel to come up with this brilliant insight: how can we know Obama and Biden and W don’t have documents at home too, huh? How come nobody searched them? Um, possibly because nobody put together enough evidence to justify a warrant? By Levin’s logic, I could ask how we can be sure Mark Levin doesn’t have dead bodies in his basement — I mean, have we checked so we can know for sure? Oh, and Fox posted a fake photo of the judge who authorized the warrant in hopes of making him look bad.
Some QAnonites are claiming the raid is good news: the (non-existent) pedophile Satanist cabal is going after Trump because he’s about to destroy them at last! David Brooks faux wrings his hands with concern: what if this enrages the base so Trump wins re-election? Which as Roy Edroso says at the link, is like arguing if Pence had only done what Trump wanted in 2021, we wouldn’t have had the Jan. 6 attempted coup — or as someone quipped online, that we shouldn’t have infuriated Sauron’s base by sending those hobbits into Mordor. Because only Democrats have agency.
Regardless of its effect on politics, I agree with Edroso that Merrick Garland made the right call.
