THE MARA A LAGO RAID
On August 8th, 2022, as a hot, muggy dawn broke in South Florida over the historic Mar-a-Lago estate, over 30 DOJ and FBI agents swarmed the 45th president’s personal residence in a surprise raid. The effect on the nation could be compared to a near-fatal heart attack. It shattered all norms and customs, twisted the law into a pretzel, and was unlike anything that had come before. It marked the beginning of a campaign of political lawfare and dirty tricks that would make an African warlord blush with envy.
JEFF CHILDERS
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This week, the Wall Street Journal ran a quiet story with an understated headline: “Behind the Mar-a-Lago Raid.” The sub-headline was slightly more informative: “New emails show the FBI was pressured by the Biden Justice Department.” The story itself was explosive, adding the final layer of explanation to one of the most destructive decisions in the early Biden term.
Much has been written about the raid, including here at C&C, and one supposes that future historians will have even more to say about it. Historically, we remain in the ‘hot takes’ phase, with unanswered questions covering the raid like hungry deer ticks.
This week, the Senate resolved one of those open mysteries: the devilish conundrum of how could this happen? How did all the checks and balances fail? Newly released documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee this week show the answer: it was not, in fact, an out-of-control FBI. It was the Democrats, by and through Merrick “Grandma” Garland’s Department of Justice.
“In missives spanning the summer of 2022,” the Journal explained, “FBI officials expressed alarm and forcefully pushed back against a DOJ-driven search warrant and raid. The FBI highlighted legal and evidentiary weaknesses, noted offers of cooperation, and proposed numerous better avenues” like “negotiating to return any classified documents.”
Not only that, but the FBI repeatedly advised the DOJ, in writing, that there was no probable cause to support a legal search. A June 1st, 2022, FBI Washington field office summary noted that “very little has been developed related to who might be culpable for mishandling documents.” It expressed “concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and may be dated.”
One mid-July FBI email expressed frustration that “we haven’t generated any new facts,” but still the DOJ was churning out “draft after draft after draft” of a warrant.
In other words, FBI officials —even in the hyper-partisan Washington field office— did everything they probably should have done. But “the DOJ ignored or overruled it all, drooling over a prosecution.” An August 4th email from one special agent complained that DOJ counsel Donald Toscas refused to consider warnings about the proposed raid— “frankly, he doesn’t give a damn about the optics.” A DOJ first contact, the agent predicted, “will not go well.”
It’s impossible to overstate how profoundly the Mar-a-Lago raid —now revealed to have had so little predicate that even DC office FBI agents fought against it— affected the country, the DOJ, and the FBI. How many DC field office agents have been fired, or transferred to plum assignments like Southwest Indian reservation cold case desks? How much public trust in the nation’s law enforcement agencies has been squandered?
How much of a mandate for change did the Mar-a-Lago raid provide President Trump? Just to pick a tiny and remote example, would Wisconsin Judge and TDS victim Hannah Dugin now be facing five years in prison, if reason had prevailed in the summer of 2022?