Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines demanding specific information on the classified documents that FBI agents allegedly found at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Largo residence.
The two senators are the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and represent a growing bipartisan consensus in the Senate that the extraordinary search and seizure of a former president’s and potential 2024 presidential candidate’s belongings in his private residence needs to be fully justified — not just to Congress but the American people.
Garland, the FBI, and some Democrats want to treat this incident as “business as usual.” Doing so only heightens speculation that they have something to hide.
The letter asks for all information regarding the rationale behind the search.
“In his remarks, Attorney General Garland claimed there was a substantial public interest in the execution of an unprecedented search warrant on President Trump,” Rubio said in a statement.”As such, the Intelligence Committee has asked the Department of Justice to share with us, on a classified basis, the specific intelligence documents seized from Mar-a-Lago,” he added.
“The Senate Intelligence Committee is charged with overseeing counterintelligence matters, including the handling and mishandling of classified information, which appears to be at the core of the search of Mar-a-Lago,” a committee spokesperson told Axios.
The spokesperson confirmed the panel “requested that DOJ and ODNI provide the committee with the classified documents that were seized in the search of Mar-a-Lago, and an assessment of potential risks to national security as a result of their mishandling.”
Byron York asks, “But again — what is in the documents? What are they about? We don’t know. And that is the key, the central, the most important thing to remember in this case. We are in a classic cycle of hair-on-fire Trump allegations, and we don’t know what they are about.”
It’s clearly reminiscent of the Russia collusion narrative, as York points out.
He continues:
Beginning in the months before Donald Trump took office, and extending well into his presidency, the media and political world took a set of vague but serious accusations of wrongdoing involving the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia and created a 24/7 frenzy of talk about secret evidence, possible criminal charges, and allegedly grave damage to national security. Fed by leaks originating in federal law enforcement, the intelligence community, and interested lawyers, ostensibly responsible observers engaged in wild speculation — COLLUSION!!! — that was terribly damaging to then-President Trump. And here was the punch line: Nobody knew what the evidence was. It was secret, classified, grand jury, ongoing investigation, whatever. All the talk was based on little bits of information, and no one, at the time, had the big picture. The secrecy cloaking the details of the case allowed anti-Trump speculation to flourish.
The Rubio/Warner letter shows that the Senate is not about to be hoodwinked again. The ocean of ink written about the Russian collusion narrative — almost all of it was hysterical, ludicrous speculation for which not one single mainstream media reporter or analyst has ever acknowledged the error. No one was ever fired for accusing the president of the United States of being a Russian intelligence asset.
We haven’t seen that kind of lunacy in Washington since the early 1960s when conservatives were accusing John F. Kennedy of being a Russian agent. The difference is that those conservatives were quite properly ignored and/or ridiculed. In 2017, reporters covering the Russian collusion story were honored by their peers.
Good luck to Rubio and Warner, but no one is expecting the same intelligence agencies who fed the hurricane of speculation about Donald Trump’s loyalties in 2017 to act any differently in 2022.
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