It’s been flying thick and fast this week
“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” — Steve Bannon to Michael Lewis
“The more we learn about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, the sillier — and more sinister — the overcaffeinated Republican defenses of former president Donald Trump look,” writes Max Boot. Trump announced the search himself as an extra-legal siege, a partisan hit job to stop him from running for president in 2024. Trump’s followers did what they do best: follow.
Trump’s attorney on site had a copy of the search warrant and the inventory of what the FBI had collected. A responsible adult might have released them to tamp down any potential for wild rumors. Instead, Trump and his cult followed Steve Bannon’s advice and flooded the zone with shit. Alleging this. Dismissing that. Whatabouting Democrats. Blaming aides. Throwing out disinformation. Anything to minimize the fact Trump had absconded with boxes of public documents, some of them classified and compartmentalized above top secret. At least one Trumpist resorted to violence based on the shit. He paid with his life.
Boot inventories a few of the reaction[arie]s:
His followers — which means pretty much the whole of the Republican Party — took up the cry based on no more information than that. Fox News host Mark Levin called the search “the worst attack on this republic in modern history, period.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) called it “corrupt & an abuse of power.” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) compared the FBI to “the Gestapo.” Not to be outdone, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Whackadoodle) said the FBI was the “American Stasi,” and compared its agents to wolves “who want to eat you.” “Today is war,” declared Steven Crowder, a podcaster with a YouTube audience of 5.6 million people. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted “DEFUND THE FBI!” Former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon, among many others, suggested that the FBI and the Justice Department (“essentially lawless criminal organizations”) might have planted evidence.
Only now, as Paul Harvey used to say, are we hearing the rest of the story — and what has been reported so far bears no relation to the persecution fantasies of Trump and his cult followers. On Thursday evening, The Post reported that FBI agents were searching for highly classified documents relating to nuclear weapons and signals intelligence — two of the most sensitive areas in the entire U.S. government. Months ago, Trump received a subpoena for documents, and the Justice Department was not convinced that he had complied with it.
Brian Tyler Cohen summarizes just some of the shit being flung.
The National Archives and Records Administration felt obliged by Friday to knock down as baseless Trump’s allegation that Barack Obama illegally took “33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” with him to Chicago. Bullshit, of course, but Trumpists will believe anything he says. Because as one rallygoer said, he’s never told a lie.
On Friday, the Florida court released the warrant and inventory that revealed just what crimes the FBI told the court Trump may have committed. Notably (New York Times):
The first law, Section 793 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, is better known as the Espionage Act. It criminalizes the unauthorized retention or disclosure of information related to national defense that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Each offense can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
Not only is releasing national security secrets to foreign adversaries criminal, but merely mishandling such documents as to put them at risk of discloure. “Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday,” the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The second, Section 1519, is an obstruction law that is part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a broad set of reforms enacted by Congress in 2002 after financial scandals at firms like Enron, Arthur Andersen and WorldCom.
Section 1519 sets a penalty of up to 20 years in prison per offense for the act of destroying or concealing documents or records “with the intent to impede, obstruct or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter” within the jurisdiction of federal departments or agencies.
[…]
The third law that investigators cite in the warrant, Section 2071, criminalizes the theft or destruction of government documents. It makes it a crime, punishable in part by up to three years in prison per offense, for anyone with custody of any record or document from federal court or public office to willfully and unlawfully conceal, remove, mutilate, falsify or destroy it.
The inventory of what the FBI collected on Monday includes “Various classified/TS/SCI documents” (top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information), “Miscellaneous Secret Documents” (multiple sets), “Miscellaneous Top Secret Documents” (multiple sets), and “Miscellaneous Confidential Documents” (multiple sets). Donald has been a bad boy.
Boot adds:
This new information turns the Trump narrative — that he is being treated worse than anyone ever in all of U.S. history — on its head. Imagine what would have happened to a lower-level government employee who was suspected of taking highly classified documents without authorization. I very much doubt that the FBI would have dealt with such a person as gently as they dealt with Trump. Anyone else caught with top-secret documents — and suspected of obstructing justice and violating the Espionage Act — would probably be in federal custody by now. Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor, was sentenced to more than five years in prison for leaking documents relating to Russian interference in the 2016 election a whole lot less sensitive than the ones Trump is suspected of taking.
Facts won’t stop MAGA from flinging shit in their master’s defense. They’ve been too well trained.
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