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Ex-intel chief urged Trump to fire FBI Director Wray in 2020
"I told President Trump we got to get rid of him," Grenell said Monday in an interview with Just the News on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "[Wray] was terrible. First of all, he didn't understand what was happening. He was so aloof to what was happening down below and had just a knee jerk reaction to everything just to protect the status quo."
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"He's a creature of the FBI," Grenell said. "And he views everything as a PR exercise. Don't criticize the FBI. Don't talk about any failures at the FBI because he loves the brand. And it was a brand exercise."
Several former Trump officials, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, reportedly learned the 45th president was contemplating firing Wray in 2020 and advised against it. Trump had already fired ex-Director James Comey for misconduct in the Hillary Clinton email probe back in 2017.
Grenell described an episode in spring 2020 when he was acting DNI and was trying to declassify documents about FBI misconduct in the Russia collusion probe and its pursuit of former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, and there "was a lot of pushback."
Lawyer Marc Elias Shows the Mar-a-Lago Raid is All About Disqualifying Trump in 2024
Why bother hiding your cards when the media won’t challenge you?
Democrat lawyer Marc Elias knows what’s up. He shows us why the Democrats raided Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago.
Because this would never apply to anyone else, right? Looking at you, Hillary.
18 U.S. Code § 2071 – Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally:
The NY Times reports:
If that’s it, then it’s even more disgraceful. Failure to return documents to the National Archives? Are you kidding me?
The feds better have MAJOR stuff on Trump that locks him away, or they may have just elected him president again.
legalinsurrection.com
If that’s it, then it’s even more disgraceful. Failure to return documents to the National Archives? Are you kidding me?
The feds better have MAJOR stuff on Trump that locks him away, or they may have just elected him president again.
Trump: FBI Raided Mar-a-Lago – 'These Are Dark Times For Our Nation'
“They even broke into my safe”
legalinsurrection.com
Joe Biden, wearing a stunning leopard-print monokini, backstroked across the Rubicon yesterday. Lefty Florida Politics broke the story late yesterday and it spread like wildfire: In service to the lowest-polling president in history, failed Supreme Court candidate Merrick Garland ordered thirty FBI agents to raid President Trump’s personal residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.The raid’s rationale remains unknown. Corporate media pundits speculated yesterday the raid was related to some “missing” National Archive documents Trump was supposed to have taken with him when he left office. In its article about the raid, for example, the Wall Street Journal noted that “Officials can face up to five years in prison for removing classified materials.” But that theory turned out to be a hot take and has mostly dried up since it emerged online that the documents had been returned to the National Archives weeks ago.
Neither DOJ or FBI commented, citing an ongoing investigation.
Trump wasn’t there when the FBI raid happened; he was in New York. President Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb, who was present during the search, confirmed that federal agents “seized paper.” A statement from the former President said agents also broke into his safe. Eric Trump, who was on site, told reporters the safe was empty, nothing was found in it.
You could say nothing like this has ever happened before an election, but the truth is, nothing like this has ever happened before in U.S. history — period, full stop. Not before, during, or after an election. It’s new territory, a brave new post-Covid world, a great reset of our of representative republic.
It is impossible to underestimate how politically significant this raid will be.
In a two-page letter released after the raid, President Trump used the term “banana republic,” and he’s not wrong. There’s a reason why former presidents have always been off-limits for criminal prosecution despite there being plenty of reasons to investigate each and every one of them. Take Biden for example. The contents of Hunter’s laptop, plus Hunter’s former business partner’s testimony, provide plenty of justification for a potentially momentous investigation of the Resident in Chief by a subsequent administration.
If the Justice Department is going to pin its raid on “improperly removed documents,” then folks will have a LOT of questions about why Bill Clinton was never prosecuted. And don’t even get me started on Hilary Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents and her private classified email server — which were also never prosecuted. The FBI credulously accepted Clinton’s explanation of ignorance of the law and cheerfully overlooked her bleach-bitted evidence destruction.
People are understandably doubtful about the raid, because there’s already a storied history of failed prosecution attempts against Trump. From Russia-gate to two impeachment cases — one for an allegedly mis-handled call with Ukraine where Trump wanted a certain former vice-president investigated, who is now directing the investigation against Trump. Not to mention that the Trump investigation is being run by an Attorney General who Trump rejected for the Supreme Court. No conflicts of interest there! Now consider how the FBI has lately been exposed selectively prosecuting Biden’s political adversaries, and has been outed for manufacturing evidence, like in Gretchen Whitmer’s “kidnapping” case.
Coincidentally, Stephen D’Antuono, the same FBI agent who led the Detroit field office during the embarrassing Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping-manufacturing evidence scandal, did such a bang-up job that he was promoted to lead the Washington D.C. office as the pandemic got under way in 2020. The FBI’s Washington D.C. office is almost certainly the same office that is now handling the Trump investigation and the raid.
So.
As it happens, I recently sued a city and its police department over what is alleged to have been a politically-motivated SWAT raid that seized electronics. That was just a local affair. In order to execute a highest-profile search like this one against former President Trump, a bunch of important high-level stuff had to happen, and a lot of top-level Biden Administration officials must have been involved.
First, a senior FBI agent had to swear out an affidavit of probable cause that would support a search. As a history-making search, it is almost certain that both FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland had to sign off on it, and may even have presented it to the court together. A federal judge had to review and approve the affidavit. We’ll eventually find out which judge it was, and I’ll bet you an all-expenses paid trip to Taiwan on Nancy Pelosi’s jet that the judge was appointed by a democrat president.
The judge would have asked the DOJ why a simple investigatory subpoena or ordinary search warrant couldn’t get the job done, and the DOJ would have to explain a concrete basis for the surprise raid that would overcome the Fourth Amendment concerns, not to mention the vast political implications. The FBI would have had to swear, for example, that they were seriously concerned about material evidence being destroyed, the documentary equivalent of a baggie of meth flushed down the john.
Even many lefty pundits recognize that this is a Rubicon moment, a kind of point of no return. The Rubicon metaphor is particularly apt, because when he crossed that river, Julius Caesar was on his way to deposing its democratic government becoming the dictator for life of the Roman Empire.
Yesterday on CNN Tonight, controversial anti-Trump Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin warned, “I hope that DOJ went about this meticulously and that there is a ‘there’ there because if not, it will tear the country apart.” She continued, “You [are] already seeing it, the rhetoric already that’s coming out from my fellow Republicans, and I’m really hoping that this was done for a credible reason and that it goes somewhere.”
If ANY reason is good enough, it better be a lot more solid than just a “credible” reason.
The Washington Examiner’s op-ed ran after 10m last night and concluded “You don’t have to be fond of Trump to realize what a dark turn of events this is … They are bringing our country right up to the edge of the Third World. It’s pretty scary stuff.”
I’d say they’ve leapt off the edge with bells on.
Obviously, there hasn’t been much time to process events, and conservative voices are just getting going. Echoing Trump’s letter, Governor DeSantis also referred to Banana Republics in his response tweet:
Expect all that outraged chatter to multiply every single day from here on into the foreseeable future.
Trump Posts Campaign Ad-Style Video to Truth Social Following FBI Raid on Mar-a-Lago
August 9, 2022The 3-minute-50-second-long video was uploaded in the wake of federal agents executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Multiple sources tell Fox News the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago is related to the materials Trump allegedly brought to his private residence after his presidency concluded. That matter was referred to the Justice Department by the National Archives and Records Administration, which said it found classified material in 15 boxes at the residence.
The video begins with Trump painting America as “a nation in decline” and discussing a myriad of issues ranging from fallout from the withdrawal of Afghanistan to skyrocketing energy prices. It begins in black and white with the sound of an ominous thunderstorm in the background.
“We are a nation that allowed Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and it will only get worse.,” Trump narrates. “We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before.”
Judge Reportedly Behind Mar-a-Lago Raid Warrant Is Former Jeffrey Epstein Lawyer, Obama Donor
Accused of leveraging “inside information about Epstein’s investigation to curry favor with Epstein,” in 2011, he was named as a prosecutor who allegedly violated the rights of an underage girl whom Epstein solicited sex from in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit.
Reinhart donated twice to Obama’s campaign in 2008 totaling $2,000. Reinhart, who was appointed U.S. magistrate in March 2018, also donated to the campaign of Trump rival Jeb Bush in 2015.
The unearthed links come as Reinhart is believed to have signed off on a warrant responsible for the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach estate.
Politico explained that of the three magistrate judges in that office, two recent warrant applications, both of which were assigned to Reinhart, were entered into the system on Monday.
An unnamed source told Fox News, “They were not being judicious about what they took.”
Multiple sources report the raid pertained to the possible taking of documents, including classified documents, from the White House. But as the president ultimately can determine a document’s status, the matter seems more pedantic than actionable. When former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger stuffed classified documents about 9/11 from the National Archives into his pants and socks in 2003 and lied about it, he endured a misdemeanor conviction, probation, a fine, and community service.
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The bureau’s continued Trump-on-the-Brain campaign against the likely 2024 presidential candidate ironically solidifies him as the nominee should he run. The drain-the-swamp mantra that animated the 2016 campaign likely grows in volume among his supporters bitter at the Justice Department’s kid-gloves treatment of Biden family corruption, almost complete disinterest in policing itself over its own illegalities involving the 2016 FISA warrants, and use of Trump as a bright, shiny object to distract from inflation, the recession, disturbing criminality, the crisis at the border, and foreign policy disasters in Afghanistan and Ukraine that all plague the current administration.
The use of federal law enforcement agents to menace a former president finds no precedent in U.S. history. But regimes in El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, and Mexico indicted former presidents in just the last two decades. Corruption, of the indicters as much as the indicted, regularly motivates such uses of state power to kneecap political rivals.
Like so much else south of the border, this phenomenon finally arrived in the United States.
Multiple sources report the raid pertained to the possible taking of documents, including classified documents, from the White House. But as the president ultimately can determine a document’s status, the matter seems more pedantic than actionable. When former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger stuffed classified documents about 9/11 from the National Archives into his pants and socks in 2003 and lied about it, he endured a misdemeanor conviction, probation, a fine, and community service.
[clip]
The bureau’s continued Trump-on-the-Brain campaign against the likely 2024 presidential candidate ironically solidifies him as the nominee should he run. The drain-the-swamp mantra that animated the 2016 campaign likely grows in volume among his supporters bitter at the Justice Department’s kid-gloves treatment of Biden family corruption, almost complete disinterest in policing itself over its own illegalities involving the 2016 FISA warrants, and use of Trump as a bright, shiny object to distract from inflation, the recession, disturbing criminality, the crisis at the border, and foreign policy disasters in Afghanistan and Ukraine that all plague the current administration.
The use of federal law enforcement agents to menace a former president finds no precedent in U.S. history. But regimes in El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, and Mexico indicted former presidents in just the last two decades. Corruption, of the indicters as much as the indicted, regularly motivates such uses of state power to kneecap political rivals.
Like so much else south of the border, this phenomenon finally arrived in the United States.
As part of Trump’s opposition to Congress, his legal team argued that the request for his tax returns was “politically motivated.”
However, the court found that the committee “has identified a legitimate legislative purpose that it requires information to accomplish. At this stage, it is not our place to delve deeper than this. The mere fact that individual members of Congress may have political motivations as well as legislative ones is of no moment.”
“Indeed, it is likely rare that an individual member of Congress would work for a legislative purpose without considering the political implications,” the court added. “The statements of individual Committee members and members who are not part of the Committee provided by the Trump Parties do not change this. The courts do not probe the motives of individual legislators. These motives are explicitly protected by the Speech or Debate Clause.”
Federal Appeals Court Rules Congress Can Go After Trump’s Tax Returns
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled that Congress has the constitutional authority to request the tax returns of former President Donald J. Trump. Since 2019, the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee has attempted to gain access to Trump’s tax...