RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2022/08/donald-trump-official-enemy-of-the-state/

“The American political establishment — leading Democrats and Republican never-Trumpers alike — is desperately afraid of a Trump political comeback in 2024. They fabricated a Russia collusion hoax, spent two years on a special counsel investigation, impeached Trump twice, jailed Trump supporters for trespassing at the Capitol, held partisan Congressional hearings to broadcast hearsay evidence against the former President without the opportunity for cross-examination, and weaponised the entire federal law enforcement bureaucracy (and some state ones, too) against this one man. And if they can do it to him, they can do it to anyone.”

The Washington Post ran it just above a (news?) article titled “Inside Biden’s Hot Streak, from the Poolside to the Capitol”. Seemingly unsure whether or not they could trust Donald Trump even on this, they went with the headline “FBI Searches Trump safe at Mar-a-Lago Club, Former President Says”. Those final three words are the editors’ hedge: maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but no one can deny that he said it.

The Post helpfully explained that Trump has a history of stealing government property from the White House, and has been at loggerheads with the National Archives over presidential records ever since he left office. A previous trawl of Trump plunder yielded “a cocktail napkin, a phone list, charts, slide decks, letters, memos, maps, talking points, a birthday dinner menu, schedules and more”—this, from a confidential source inside the investigation!

The desperation of the American political establishment has come to this: attempting to prosecute a former president for appropriating a White House cocktail napkin. Not even a full-sized linen serviette! They probably don’t have little ‘White House’ monograms in the corner.

Well, Trump always did like monograms.

The Wall Street Journal — a News Corp outlet but editorially independent — reported that “Former President Donald Trump said FBI agents ‘raided’ his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Monday” (their scare quotes, not mine). In its full explainer article, the paper exulted that:

Officials can face up to five years in prison for removing classified materials to an unauthorized location. The penalties for breaking other laws related to the removal of official records also include disqualification from holding federal office—including the presidency.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/clean-house-fbi-justice-department/

The two most striking features of the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are its bold intrusiveness and the public’s mistrust of the Bureau’s honesty and integrity. The Department of Justice could have used low-profile subpoenas to force Trump to turn over any documents, including the most sensitive ones. It didn’t. Instead, it sent carloads of federal agents to search the former president’s house. That raid was also unusual in a second sense. Although mishandling federal documents is a felony, it happens with some frequency, alas, and is almost never subject to full-scale raids.

The blowback has been a Category 5 storm. The damage has grown because the FBI and Department of Justice remained silent for three days, refusing to explain their actions.

Now, the FBI or DoJ are busy leaking their justification, alleging (anonymously) that Trump took highly-classified nuclear secrets when he left office. That would be a grave matter, if true, but it raises several obvious questions. One is whether he really did wrongly remove such materials. The second is whether less-invasive means could have been used to retrieve them. The third is whether the real purpose of the raid was to collect materials for other investigations, such as January 6 and Trump’s efforts to delay Joe Biden’s certification as president. Seized materials can be used in other investigations, but it is illegal to get warrants for one purpose when your real purpose is something else. The fourth is public skepticism about the government’s explanations.

The blowback and public mistrust are nothing new. The past few years have been hurricane season for the FBI. The Bureau and, to a lesser extent, the Department of Justice have destroyed their reputations and undermined the public trust essential for law enforcement in a democracy.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/13/a-token-of-the-managerial-age-bewails-trumps-surge/

I was chatting with a politically mature friend today who, in the course of some delighted words about Attorney General Merrick Garland, reminded me that in his famous “evil empire” speech of 1983, Ronald Reagan quoted a few choice lines from the preface of C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. “The greatest evil,” Lewis wrote, is not now done in any Dickensian “dens of iniquity” or even in “concentration camps and labor camps.” Such brutish moral cesspools, Lewis says, are rather “the final result” of the encompassing evil evoked in his awesome (in the old sense) satire. 

On the contrary, the evil he has in mind is “conceived and ordered . . . in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Men, that is to say, like Merrick Garland, a lugubrious embodiment of the “Managerial Age,” the “world of ‘Admin’” that Lewis so abhorred. Here, he suggested, is the home office of Hell, “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business con­cern.”

The reason, by the way, my friend’s words about Merrick Garland were “delighted” was because of the huge, if inadvertent, boost the attorney general has just given to Donald Trump’s political prospects. 

Monday’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence, was probably the single biggest boon to his stature among voters since he left office in January 2021, bigger even than the partisan witch hunt over which future CNN hostess, Liz Cheney, has been presiding with such ostentatious zeal.

This is obviously a concern among the beautiful, well-pressed people with white collars and clean fingernails who hate Trump. Employing a ju-ju they recognize but do not understand, Trump has time and again demonstrated an uncanny ability to goad his would-be attackers into contortions of self-immolation. 

https://www.city-journal.org/the-elite-panic-of-2022

On April 18, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the federal requirement for wearing surgical masks on airplanes, in airports, and while riding mass transit. Online videos showed passengers and airline staff ripping off their masks and celebrating in mid-flight. Given the accumulated frustration of two years of pandemic travel, the reaction was understandable.

Far more remarkable was the vehemence of those opposed to the ruling. Judge Mizelle was unfit for office, they said. She was too young, at 35; she was unelected; she was a single, unrepresentative voice. Worst of all, she was an “activist Trump judge” and thus branded with the mark of the beast. Rescinding government policy—the kind of thing that American judges engage in with abandon, and usually to progressive cheers—in this instance was condemned as a usurpation of the powers of the executive branch.

Judge Mizelle had crashed an exclusive party reserved for people of higher caste. “The CDC has the capability, through a large number of trained epidemiologists, scientists, to be able to make projections and make recommendations,” said Anthony Fauci, bureaucratic czar of all things Covid-19. “Far more than a judge with no experience in public health.”

That was the heart of the matter. Fauci embodied a bureaucracy and political class that, with the active support of the media, had converted the public’s fear of infection into a principle of elite authority. Under this principle, only trained scientists can make projections and recommendations. The writ of government stretched as far as the boundaries of scientific truth—and those boundaries were, of course, determined by government agencies. It wasn’t just a question of specific policies like lockdowns and vaccine mandates. At stake was the restoration of the public’s habit of obedience that had gone missing during the Trump years.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fbi-rubicon-donald-trump-mar-a-lago-raid/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=15c8b91727-

Everyone knows that in January 49 BC Julius Caesar, about to lead part of his army across the Rubicon river, said “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast.” Except that, according to Plutarch, what he really said was “Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος,” “let the die be cast,” and he did not so much say it as quote it, since the already-proverbial line came from the Greek playwright Menander. Anyway, in bringing an army across the stream that separated cis-Alpine Gaul from Italy proper, Caesar had committed treason. In crossing the Rubicon he had crossed a line, sparking the civil war that engulfed Rome and formalized the end of the Republic that had, as Caesar himself noted, been dead in all-but-name-only for decades.

Contemplating the recent actions of our secret police, known to some as the FBI, I have often wondered where to locate their Rubicon. Was it when they conducted a dawn raid against Roger Stone, having been careful to alert CNN beforehand so they could be on hand to publicize the attack? Maybe it was when they burst into the apartment of Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe, throwing him out in the hallway in his pajamas, while they ransacked his home looking for a diary kept by Joe Biden’s daughter? Or perhaps it was when they arrested former Trump aide Peter Navarro, throwing him in handcuffs and leg irons before depositing him in jail? Or when they accosted the lawyer John Eastman and confiscated his cell phone? That seems to have become a favorite pastime of the FBI, seizing people’s cell phones. Just a couple of days ago, they took Representative Scott Perry’s phone. “But,” you point out, “Perry is a Republican and Trump ally. He has no property rights.”

Well, there is that. But still, I keep wondering: where is our Rubicon? Where is the line that, once crossed, signals, definitively, the end of one thing and the beginning of something else?

I hesitate to make any predictions about that because I have been wrong about it so often in the past. “Surely,” I have thought, “this is it. The American people will not stand for this.”

But then they do. James Comey was OK. So was Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith and Michael Sussmann. The FBI does something outrageous. There are little eructations of unhappiness. Then people go back to their lattes and put it out their minds.