Playing the Mar-a-Lago Refs
Trump & the GOP are going ballistic in order to convince Merrick Garland NOT to indict. And it may work.
No one should have been surprised that Donald Trump and his enablers — which number pretty much every GOP elected official, candidate for office, party leader, and Republican voter — went ballistic when news broke that the FBI had executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.
The Department of Justice was seeking to retrieve documents, some highly-classified, that Trump stole from the White House when we he left office on January 20, 2021. The National Archives, and then the FBI, tried for a grand total of 18 months to get Trump to return the documents — even issuing a subpoena — to little avail. At one point, Trump finally returned 15 boxes worth of contraband. Then, months later, on June 3, Trump’s lawyer wrote the FBI to inform them that no more classified documents remained in Trump’s position. We now know that wasn’t true. The FBI was forced to issue and execute a warrant, and retrieved at least 11 sets of classified documents — one marked Top Secret, and another Top Secret/SCI, an incredibly high classification reserved for the most sensitive of American secrets.
Trump World, in turn, threatened the FBI, threatened the individual agents and their families, threatened the judge who approved the raid (and even his synagogue), and threatened members of Congress and their families, while also threatening open rebellion and civil war.
I just read an opinion piece from Reuters, warning of violence should Trump be indicted, let alone convicted. The piece warns that Merrick Garland must take such an eventuality into account when deciding whether to prosecute Trump. I disagree. There’s already been violence. Trump and his supporters attempted a coup d’état on January 6, and they’re planning another for 2024. It’s happened, and it’s going to happen, whether we like it or not. Ignoring Trump’s crimes won’t avoid the inevitable, and in fact, makes it all the more likely. The fact that Trump has gotten away with murder (one hopes simply metaphorical) for sixty years has surely emboldened the crime-ophilic behavior we’ve seen from him in the past six years. Imagine what Trump will be like, and attempt, should he get away with his latest crimes as well. 2024 will be a shit-show of unimaginable proportions, when Trump refusing to acknowledge his defeat, and Trumpy county election officials, secretaries of state, state legislators and governors not only refuse to recognize the Democratic victor, but proclaim Trump the winner instead. And all that’s assuming Trump ISN’T already in jail.
In the end, we don’t know what will happen if Trump is indicted. We do know what will happen if he’s not.
JOHN
PS I’ve also started a Discord, check it out over at discord.aravosis.com