No, America, this is not, nor was it ever normal. It was never normal to raid the private home of a former president of the United States of America. It was never normal for the SWAT or HRT squad from the FBI to hit the home of Donald Trump to retrieve documents the Presidential Records Act exists to protect. It was never normal for Joe Biden to green-light this raid to retrieve documents that Donald Trump had declassified. It was never normal to weaponize the National Archives to assert outsized control to demand documents turned over that were under the purview of the president. And it was never normal to go in hot to retrieve documents from the home of a president.
This high-stakes rock, paper, scissors was never normal. It was a naked power play.
I needed to mention this because some people in this country believe that when it comes to Cheeto Man, all presumptions of innocence, benefits of the doubt, and normality are tossed aside.
Here's the reaction I got when I responded to a tweet by disgraced spy infiltrator Congressman Eric Swalwell, who was making one of his limp-wristed attempts to punch-slap above his weight at his better, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who was aghast at the shoot-to-kill orders at Mar-a-Lago.
Swalwell characterized MTG's comment as a "dangerous" "lie." "Its intent is to inspire violence against President Biden and Democrats in a perverted sense of self-defense. MAGA can’t win with votes so they choose violence."
I intentionally used the congressman's word "dangerous" to make the point that sending in armed men and women with the authorization to use deadly force if needed is a dangerous prospect when going into a president's HOME. Men and women are sent to war with fewer options. The question I challenged him and his acolytes to answer was, "Why doesn't this bother you?" This is a serious question.
No one goes to social media to get the tablets from the mountaintop, but people on social media do give you an idea of how they think.
Here's a sampling of some of my "favorite" answers.
Here's one suggesting we are Putin's poodle if we don't think the raid on a president's home was warranted, literally and figuratively.
Here's another suggesting that Joe Biden, who dropped the checkered flag on all of this lawfare, would never do such a thing.
And here's a lady who thinks that because Trump wasn't there, it was perfectly appropriate to raid his home over declassified documents.
These responses came after we just learned of the FBI's catastrophic chain-of-custody failure with some of the boxes of documents they took. It was after we found out the feds staged the photos. A former president is up on federal charges over these documents and we know the feds biffed the evidence and staged a crime scene—and we're expected to be OK with this?
What is wrong with these people? Where has America gone so far wrong that citizens with rights believe it perfectly fine to raid the home of a person, a former president of the United States of America, who had been negotiating with NARA over documents? When was this normalized in the body politic? What will these serfs fall for next?
My shock, I'm happy to say, is shared by Kevin Roberts, CEO of the Heritage Foundation.
Americans of all political leanings should be outraged, and frankly shaken to the bone, by the latest details concerning the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago.
President Biden’s Attorney General gave the FBI the green light to use deadly force in storming the home of a former and potential future president without advance notice and without regard to who might have been in the residence.
For his entire term, President Biden’s weaponization of the federal government against not just his political opponent, but against parents, people of faith, and conservatives is unprecedented and a grave threat to our constitutional republic.
Our political leaders in Washington must step up to the plate to hold this administration accountable, and as I have said before, the FBI should be started over from scratch and rebuilt from the ground up. The very fabric of our nation depends upon it.
"Shaken to the bone" is exactly right.
Mike Davis of the Article III Project and a Trump ally has always suspected that the FBI was sent to raid Trump's home to collect the deep background documents about Crossfire Hurricane—Russia! Russia! Russia!—that Trump declassified on his way out of office. They wanted to get back the evidence, he believes, because "[T]hey know if he gets back into the White House and releases these Crossfire Hurricane records it's game over for Obama, Biden, Hillary, the FBI, the CIA, the broader law enforcement and intel community."
He told former Trump aide Steve Bannon, "This is the biggest scandal in American history, and that's why President Trump is facing this unprecedented lawfare. This is why they sent in deadly force to go get these records."
And that ought to make every civil libertarian and Joe Six Pack American sick with grief over the state of their nation.
