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Abbreviated pundit roundup: The FBI executes a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago [1]
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Date: 2022-08-09
Marc Caputo and Ryan Reilly at NBC News:
Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, who said she was present for Monday’s search, told NBC News that Trump and his team have been “cooperative with FBI and DOJ officials every step of the way,” while adding that the bureau “did conduct an unannounced raid and seized paper.” A senior government official told NBC News that the FBI was at Mar-a-Largo “for the majority of the day” and confirmed that the search warrant was connected to the National Archives. Trump this year had to return 15 boxes of documents that were improperly taken from the White House, the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, said in February.
Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine asks the key question -— what’s in the safe?
I called a few former aides to the former president to see what they remembered about his secure storage methods. Had he talked about his safes? Had anyone seen his safe? Was it gold? [...] Another former Trump staffer did remember something from 2015, however. “We were talking about him running for president and he was saying he was serious,” this person said. Trump was scheduled to stop in Louisiana before flying out of the country. On the 24th floor of Trump Tower, two staffers waited on the boss. “He comes down and he goes, ‘Shit, I have to go to the safe,’” this person said. “He comes down with one of those TRUMP-MAR-A-LAGO bags — downstairs, if you bought a tie or something at the Trump store, you’d get a nice fancy shopping bag like you’d get at Saks – with about $50,000 in cash and six containers of white Tic-Tacs. And he was going through the border. I know he didn’t declare that to customs!”
More analysis at Yahoo! News:
[F]or a deliberate Justice Department keen to turn the page from the politicization of the Trump era, the raid of Mar-a-Lago most likely required reviews at the highest levels and convincing evidence supporting a finding of probable cause, legal experts said. "I cannot imagine the amount of probable cause set forth in a search warrant's supporting FBI affidavit of Trump's Florida home," said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor from Northern Virginia. He added in an email to Insider that the number of "review levels" for the search warrant "must have been enormous, including by Trump's FBI appointee Christopher Wray."
David Smith at The Guardian analysis the unsurprising reaction from the right:
The Republican response on Monday drew from a familiar playbook: Trump has long maintained that the Russia investigation, for example, was a “hoax” and part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him. Scrutiny of his removal of presidential records, or his role in the January 6 insurrection, is likely to produce a similar backlash. Joe Walsh, a Trump critic and former Republican congressman, tweeted: “The Republican Party has abandoned the rule of law. Just listen to them tonight. They’re at war with the rule of law.
Kat Bouza at Rolling Stone:
After years of defending the continued militarization of law enforcement agencies across the United States, Republican lawmakers appeared to have a change of heart Monday after learning the FBI executed a search at the Florida estate of former President Donald Trump. Faced with the possibility that the “good guys” might not be on their side after all, prominent members of party that made backing the blue a central tenet of its political platform in recent years began spouting rhetoric that suspiciously mirrored the talking points of Conservatives’ most feared bogeyman: antifa.
And on a final note, here’s Harry Litman at The Los Angeles Times on our “long national nightmare”:
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