August can be a slow news month — so, when Fox News host Tucker Carlson arranged to go on vacation last week, leaving the show to guest hosts, he probably figured he wouldn’t be missing out on anything major.
On Monday, however, the FBI raided the home of a former president for the first time. The best laid plans of mice and men, etc.
Carlson’s monologue condemning the raid on Donald Trump’s home this Monday, then, may have been a week in coming. It was no less forceful, however, with Carlson telling viewers that “the raid of Mar-a-Lago was not an act of law enforcement” but instead “an attack on the rule of law” and “a power grab.”
“We’ve had a few days to reflect on it and have concluded that no honest person could believe that the raid on Donald Trump’s home last week was a legitimate act of law enforcement. It was not,” Carlson began.
“Even the Biden administration didn’t really bother to pretend otherwise. The official explanations that we have heard for the raid make no sense at all. It doesn’t matter how forcefully they are repeated by the media, they’re nonsensical.”
As we know now, the Department of Justice believed that former President Trump had improperly stored classified documents at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate. Trump has countered by saying the documents were declassified via a “standing order” he had regarding work he took to Mar-a-Lago while president.
However, while those in officialdom have been wringing their hands and sounding the alarm over the potential damage these documents could do in an unsecured environment, Carlson noted that “virtually anything can qualify as an official state secret and often does.”
As an example: “In 2011, to name one of many examples, the CIA finally declassified a trove of documents from the First World War. These documents dated back to 1917, almost 100 years before. One of these documents, the most ultra-secret of them, contained a recipe for disappearing ink.”
“Now, why would federal bureaucrats spend an entire century hiding an outdated recipe for ink that you can buy legally in any magic store for your fifth grader?” Carlson asked.
Was the Mar-a-Lago raid a political stunt?
“Here’s the truth. The documents have been classified for 100 years, not because disappearing ink was any sort of national security secret. They’d been classified because the government’s default position in every case is that you have no right to see anything ever,” he continued.
“It is their information. It is not yours. You’re just a citizen. You’re just the taxpayer. Shut up and pay for it all.”
But, Carlson continued, let’s say “for the sake of argument, we’re going to stipulate that Trump did have possession of documents that were classified for some good reason. Documents that, for example, we legitimately would not want the Chinese government to see.
“If that is true, would it justify what happened?” he asked. “Would it justify sending a large team of federal agents to shut down the entire southern tip of Palm Beach to raid Mar-a-Lago on a weekday?”
Carlson pretty much answered this when he said “one of the laws they’re telling you that Trump broke doesn’t even have criminal penalties attached to it because it’s not serious enough.”
“Federal paramilitaries don’t show up at your house when you violate the Presidential Records Act,” Carlson said.
“And in fact, as we later learned, the actual warrant for the raid, which was signed by an openly partisan judge who — because you couldn’t make any of this up if you tried — once represented Jeffrey Epstein’s side in the famous underage sex case … that judge allowed the FBI to seize virtually every piece of paper in Donald Trump’s house, whether or not it had ever been classified.”
But then there was the second explanation for the raid — not only were the documents classified, they involved nuclear secrets. As Carlson pointed out, “that revised story line was leaked anonymously to an obedient press corps, which, as you just saw, repeated every word like it was verifiable fact.”
“Once again, no one even bothered to explain what these nuclear secrets might be. What’s a nuclear secret exactly, and what did Trump plan to do with them? Did he plan to defect to Moscow, give the launch codes to Vladimir Putin, start his own rogue state in the Bahamas?” Carlson said.
But, of course, we couldn’t be shown the documents — or even get any sort of inkling as to what was in them — because to do so would jeopardize national security. We just had to let them vouch for it.
Except, of course, if the nuclear secrets were that dangerous, why had the feds waited so long to act?
“If the Biden administration really believed that, if they really thought Donald Trump possessed documents that posed an imminent danger to American national security, then you have to wonder, why did they wait a year and a half to do anything about it? Why did they wait till 90 days before a midterm election, an election that polls suggest they will lose?” Carlson said. “It doesn’t make — oh, wait, actually, it does make sense.
“In fact, the question answers itself. Despite superficial appearances, the raid of Mar-a-Lago was not an act of law enforcement. It was the opposite of that. It was an attack on the rule of law. It was a power grab,” he continued.
“The same week the Biden White House announced that Joe Biden will definitely seek a second term as president, the same week, the Biden Justice Department launched an armed raid against Biden’s main rival in that same presidential election. That’s what happened. Pause for a minute. If The New York Times told you that something like that was going on in Chad or the Gambia, what would your reaction be?
“You’d probably say to yourself, ‘Thank God I don’t live in a place like that, a country where politicians used armed men to cling to power,’” he continued. “Oh, but you do live in a country like that. You do. The evidence is all around us. We just don’t want to see it.”
This is, perhaps, the one thing Carlson missed during his extended Monday monologue. While one appreciates the sentiment, if I heard the former Gambian president had his home raided at the behest of the current Gambian president, I’d react as if it were business as usual. When I heard the FBI had raided the home of one of our former presidents at the behest of our current, my thought was that it was business as usual — just so long as it wasn’t the home of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
This June 16 marked the seventh anniversary of the Great Trump Hunt. The moment our future president came down the elevator, the investigations began. Alfa Bank. Carter Page. The Steele dossier. Michael Flynn. The “pee tape.” The James Comey firing. Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The valuation of the Trump Organization. The “quid pro quo” with Ukraine. The list goes on.
It doesn’t matter how much substantive wrongdoing any investigation into these pseudo-scandals found. Usually, they turned up a big, fat goose egg — but that didn’t stop them from happening, over and over again. Every time, Democrats and their enablers in the liberal media assured us something was going to happen this time around. Just you wait!
Only a fool could believe the raid was a “legitimate act of law enforcement” and will end in charges, given the history of these Trump-centric investigations. Sure, raiding Mar-a-Lago may have upped the ante a bit, but you’ve got to make a pretty big splash these days to get our attention regarding Trump. At least they managed that.
And, while this likely won’t end with the former president in a criminal court, only a fool could believe that Biden’s Department of Justice will make that official before the midterms. Welcome to the Gambia.
