PAYBACK: Mar-a-Largo Search Related to 'Mishandling of Classified Documents'

Remember the good old days when the FBI and the Justice Department didn’t think Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents was worthy of an indictment?

Hillary Clinton used a private email server to send tens of thousands of classified government documents to recipients. It’s a violation of the Presidential Records Act to knowingly use an unsecured email server to send sensitive documents, but the FBI and the Department of Justice gave Clinton a pass. Then-FBI Director James Comey found that Clinton’s actions were “extremely careless” but not indictable.

Federal authorities never searched Hillary Clinton’s home or her office for evidence related to the investigation. But then, Hillary wasn’t running against Joe Biden for president in 2024.

Washington Post:

One of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its details, said agents were conducting a court-authorized search as part of a long-running investigation of whether documents — some of them top-secret — were taken to the former president’s private golf club and residence instead of sent to the National Archives when Trump left office. That could be a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes and other written communications related to a president’s official duties.

Searching a former president’s property to look for possible evidence of a crime is highly unusual and would require approval at the top levels of the Justice Department. It represents a historic moment in Trump’s tortured relationship with the Justice Department, both in and out of the White House.

For this kind of search, the authorization to proceed had to come from the very top. What possessed Joe Biden to rile the Republican base and send the conspiracy theorists’ tongues wagging is beyond comprehension. The unprecedented search of a former president’s home because of suspected “mishandling of classified documents”? Really?

Sheesh.

The search had nothing to do with the events of January 6. It had nothing to do with the supposed effort to “overthrow the government” or “initiate a coup.” This is an entirely separate investigation, and it apparently has to do with 15 boxes of presidential records and other items that Trump took when he left office that the National Archives retrieved from Mar-a-Largo in January.

No search warrant was necessary at that time. According to Trump, no warrant would have been necessary this time either.

The inventory of unclassified items in the boxes that were recovered earlier this year from Mar-a-Lago is roughly 100 pages long, according to a person familiar with that document. Descriptions of items that were improperly taken to Mar-a-Lago include a cocktail napkin, a phone list, charts, slide decks, letters, memos, maps, talking points, a birthday dinner menu, schedules and more, this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the ongoing investigation.

There is a separate inventory for just the classified materials that were taken to the former president’s Florida residence, this person said. If the unclassified version of the classified inventory were organized in the same way as the inventory of nonclassified items, it would be about three pages long, according to this person.

There were 33,000 pages of classified information retrieved from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, while authorities found thousands of other classified Clinton emails on the server of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, husband of Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin. And the Feds blew this investigation into a constitutional crisis for three pages of classified stuff?

How classified were these papers? The WaPo source says as far as the classification level, they range from “confidential to top-secret to special handling categories,” hardly a hanging offense.

Joe Biden really, really, really doesn’t want to run against Donald Trump ins 2024, does he?