Former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany laid out a common pattern the Justice Department has followed in dealing with those associated with former President Donald Trump.
The Fox News host argued on Tuesday’s “Outnumbered” that the DOJ now appears to be employing the same tactic against Trump himself in light of the FBI’s raid on his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, the previous day.
“This is very personal for somebody the FBI was, you could argue, looking at for six years,” McEnany said.
“We know about the [Steele] dossier. We know the way it was peddled. We know that there was an insurance policy, if you read Peter Strzok’s texts. So all the things President Trump was saying, this just pours fuel on that fire,” she recounted.
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In August 2016, then FBI agent Strzok texted his lover then-FBI attorney Lisa Page that the bureau needed to have an “insurance policy” in case Trump got elected.
The Wall Street Journal reported the insurance policy was the Trump-Russia probe launched the previous month.
“I will say I think you can’t look at this in isolation,” McEnany said of the raid on Trump’s home, reportedly to obtain classified documents he allegedly has not turned over to the National Archives.
Do you agree with McEnany that there is a pattern?
“I think you have to look at this in light of other Trump-related prosecutions. What I mean by that is in this case it’s the Presidential Records Act,” she argued.
McEnany cited George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley to point out the Presidential Records Act of 1978 has rarely been used for criminal prosecution.
GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley: Biden FBI’s raid was “heavy-handed” and “unprecedented” pic.twitter.com/44eBN2xUpI
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 9, 2022
“You look at Paul Manafort who was the [2016] campaign manager for Donald Trump. It was a [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violation they pursued. FARA has been used seven times in 50 years, but it’s brought out against Paul Manafort, this despite there being rampant FARA violations: 62 percent of people admitting they report late,” McEnany, a Harvard Law School graduate, said.
The DOJ Office of Inspector General released a report in September 2016 finding that “62 percent of initial registrations were untimely.”
“And then the Logan Act, used against Michael Flynn,” McEnany said. “This is a 1799 statute that has never in the history of this country been used to successfully prosecute anyone, but it’s used as a pretext to go in and look at Michael Flynn.”
“Why are never before used statutes or rarely used statutes in those contexts being used in this manner?” she asked.
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued in a Tuesday opinion piece in The Hill that if the DOJ wanted documents from Trump, prosecutors should have made the case to a grand jury to obtain a subpoena specifying the materials to be seized.
“Instead, the FBI apparently seized everything in view and will sort the documents and other material without a court’s deciding which ones are appropriately subject to Justice Department seizure,” Dershowitz wrote.
.@alandersh: “I don’t think you use search warrants and prosecutions to go after political enemies”
Read more: https://t.co/6ljnroh6Bz pic.twitter.com/NZTqjArGkK
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) August 9, 2022
“Defenders of the raid argue that the search warrant was issued by a judge,” he added. “Yet every criminal defense lawyer knows that search warrants are issued routinely and less critically than candy is distributed on Halloween; judges rarely exercise real discretion or real supervision. It may be different when a president’s home is the object of the search, but only time will tell whether that was the case here.”
Dershowitz pointed out no such raids were conducted on Hillary Clinton’s or former Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger’s homes, when they were accused of mishandling classified documents.
“It is true that a president or former president is not above the law — but neither should he or she be below the law. Precedents established in relation to Democrats must be equally applied to Republicans. On the face of it, this standard has not been met here,” he wrote.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News Tuesday, “In my view, this is a raid that will go down in infamy. The Biden administration has crossed the Rubicon in terms of attacking President Trump and their political opponents by misusing law enforcement.”
Judicial Watch President @TomFitton joins @FoxNews to discuss the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. pic.twitter.com/HIUvDojXW0
— Judicial Watch ⚖️ (@JudicialWatch) August 9, 2022
“I tell you the FBI and the Justice Department can’t be trusted and should be thoroughly reformed, and frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think they’re redeemable at this point.”
