A week and a day after the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in South Florida, the American public is still in the dark about too much of what is going on in their own government.
But one thing was apparent from the beginning, and it’s getting clearer by the day:
The truth about the Mar-a-Lago mission is not coming from President Joe Biden’s Justice Department — or Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In a Twitter post published late Monday, Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of The Federalist, sketched out three ways Garland and his Justice Department, with the bootlicking cooperation of the mainstream media, have been actively deceiving the people they’re supposed to serve.
It’s an ugly picture.
“DOJ is panicking,” Davis wrote. “First, Garland claimed the warrant was narrow. That was a lie. Then Garland claimed DOJ would only speak through court filings. That was a lie, as these leaks prove. DOJ claimed the raid was URGENT! Also a lie, since Garland piddled around for weeks beforehand.”
DOJ is panicking. First, Garland claimed the warrant was narrow. That was a lie. Then Garland claimed DOJ would only speak through court filings. That was a lie, as these leaks prove. DOJ claimed the raid was URGENT! Also a lie, since Garland piddled around for weeks beforehand. https://t.co/DIMqFRusD6
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 16, 2022
That’s brutal, but it’s also accurate.
Every lie begets the need for several more.
— Arjun Ray (@arayq2) August 16, 2022
The propagandists of the liberal media might quibble with some of the verbiage. In his hair-splitting, robotic statement to the news media on Thursday, Garland didn’t actually say outright that the search of Trump’s home was “narrow,” he simply implied in such a way that any reasonable American would assume that’s exactly what he was saying.
“Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and do narrowly scope any search that was undertaken,” the attorney general told his country, with nary a quiver in his throat.
But there was nothing whatsoever “narrow” about the FBI raid, which involved in the neighborhood of 30 agents and support staff and lasted about 10 hours. At National Review – a conservative website with a well-documented history as a nest of vituperous NeverTrumpers – former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy blasted the warrant for the search as a blatantly politicized weapon to seek evidence to tie Trump to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion.
“This search warrant was a license for a fishing expedition. In an ocean,” McCarthy wrote.
Corrupt leadership + folks that show up in the morning and just do as they are told. Do they have an oath? Does anyone working there even care? Does not look good. Short of a Herculean leadership is there any hope for these places? Where is the rule of law?
— Me Ronin Dog (@MeRoninDog) August 16, 2022
Garland, like any good lawyer, knows exactly what he’s saying and exactly how he’s shading the truth, so he knew exactly what he was doing in that moment of nationally televised contempt for his countrymen.
He’s also a former federal judge who was stopped from becoming a lifetime member of the Supreme Court through the grace of God and the guts and brains of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
(Many Trump supporters don’t like McConnell, for understandable reasons. It’s a free country. But decency and intellectual honesty require any conservative to acknowledge that the man who kept Garland off the Supreme Court, and kept it open until Trump could win his presidency, deserves the gratitude of generations of Americans now living and those yet to be born – literally, considering the Supreme Court’s finest moment of the past 50 years. We all have our roles to play.)
Garland’s next “lie,” as Davis put it, was his claim that the Justice Department would speak “only through its filings” in court.
Right. That’s why the attorney general had barely finished speaking before sources almost certainly inside his department – and maybe even in his own office — started leaking to all its usual suspects about just how horrifying that home in Mar-a-Lago was. The Washington Post might have scored its next Pulitzer for journalistic prostitution with the scoop that the search involved “documents relating to nuclear weapons.”
The Post didn’t say what kind of documents, what kind of “nuclear weapons” or how they might be related — it just raised the specter of a former United States president as some kind of traitor not to be trusted with information that literally could threaten the existence of his country.
The Mar-a-Lago raid was conducted by a Justice Department agency – the FBI – on behalf of the Justice Department, in an operation Garland, the head of the Justice Department, acknowledged he had personally approved.
So, what department is leaking tantalizing information to the Post about what the search obtained, Housing and Urban Development?
The final “lie” is again the implied urgency of the operation. What exactly was it about Monday, Aug. 8, that made that the day the FBI had to descend on Palm Beach in platoon-strength force, armed to the teeth?
No doubt, it was the nuclear-weapons information some HUD flunky leaked to the Post, because who doesn’t want the government to act quickly in the face of existential threats?
And yet, according to The Wall Street Journal (which maybe has a source in … the Department of Agriculture?), Garland “deliberated for weeks” over whether to seek a search warrant for the Mar-a-Lago home.
So, the attorney general engaged in Hamlet-like agonizing even while “documents related to nuclear weapons” were posing a direct threat to the lives of Americans? Not even progressive Democrats should be able to believe that.
It’s no doubt just a coincidence that the warrant was sought and the raid took place while the Biden family, including enfant terrible Hunter Biden, were out of the capital on vacation.
Do you think the Justice Department is stonewalling on the Trump raid?
If this is how Merrick Garland chooses to treat his fellow citizens, it’s no wonder suspicion and distrust of his department – already widespread because of its role in the “Russia collusion” hoax that bedeviled the first years of Trump’s presidency – are growing.
The fact that the Justice Department is actually trying to keep secret the affidavit that led to the search warrant, and threatening to redact it to the point of unintelligibility if it’s forced to release it, will only further corrode the vital sense of trust between the American people and their government.
As things stand in the first quarter of the 21st century, there’s not a lot of room for that corrosion.
As some responses to Davis’ post make clear, under the Biden administration, the sense of trust is already perilously low:
Exposure of how CORRUPT the FBI and DOJ are and their leadership…
— Mia (@MiafarmHer1) August 16, 2022
All arrows point to Joe Biden. He ended Garland’s deliberations.
— edgiesversion 22MidtermsMatter (@edgiesversion) August 16, 2022
Imagine the freakout if Trump DOJ had raided the Obama’s 5 homes or the Clinton basement bathroom server or Biden’s 3 homes looking for Hunter’s laptop? Also imagine the Republican back peddling and apologies if Trump had done so.
— Robert Kemp ?????????????? (@YKM279) August 16, 2022
It’s not a surprise at this point that Democratic administrations are more than willing to use their power over federal agencies. The Justice Department’s scandalous politicization under Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder never got the attention it deserved.
The Barack Obama White House’s disgraceful weaponization of the IRS to squelch conservative groups in the lead-up to the 2012 election was ignored by the Democratic propagandists in the mainstream media a decade ago, and their toleration of Democratic deception has only gotten worse.
But for an attorney general of the United States to stand before the American public to deliver deliberate omissions, statements that are deliberately misleading — lies, in other words — is a new nadir.
The American people deserve better than that.
Hopefully, starting with the November midterm elections that put the GOP in power on Capitol Hill, they’ll start getting it.