Originally posted by Matt Taibbi on Substack(subscription):
Did that big news two weeks ago actually happen?
Excuse me for giving a damn, but what happened to the Trump raid story?
Two weeks ago, the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was the biggest story on earth and seemingly one of the most consequential American news events since 9/11. The search inspired a few hours of social media jubilation, followed by roughly a week of frenzied leaking as a parade of national security soothsayers unspooled sinister scenarios on TV, and then — nothing. The line went dead. By last week’s end, the cancellation of Brian Stelter on CNN was a top national headline in comparison.
With a caveat that the relative quiet could be upended by a court decision Thursday, could we pause to reflect on the oddness of this episode? Has a story this big ever receded to the back pages this quickly?
Once the FBI finished searching, everyone from Andrew Cuomo to the New Yorker to Mother Jones to George Will at the Washington Post pointed out the obvious, that the Justice Department needed to quickly produce an explanation, if not an indictment, to avoid the disaster of allowing the perception of a politicized raid to fester.
Instead of providing that explanation, officials across the board posed in the manner of comic strip figures, each pointing at the other and appearing genuinely surprised to be answering questions about it. On the day after the search, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre dumped the matter squarely in the Attorney General’s lap, denying President Joe Biden knew what was coming a remarkable eight times:
One: “No.”
Two: “The President was not briefed.”
Three: He “was not aware of it.”
Four: “No one at the White House was given a heads up.”
Five: “That did not happen.”
Six: “The White House learned about this FBI search from public reports.”
Seven. “We learned just like the American public did yesterday.”
Eight: “We did not have advance notice of this activity.”
It now looks like that’s all reporters are going to get from Biden, at least until the next time his handlers let him out of his cage. When Fox asked for more comment Sunday, the White House referred them back to Jean-Pierre’s remarks. This is the political equivalent of Biden wedging a hornet’s nest on Merrick Garland’s head and holding it there.
The Attorney General strode to a press conference podium three days after the raid looking like a condemned man. He hinted the raid only became public knowledge because Trump blabbed about it, then said the DOJ only filed a motion to release the search warrant “in light of the former president’s public confirmation of the search” and because of “substantial public interest.” Garland toward the end of his remarks said he’d “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” briefly held his hand up to beseech reporters to hold their questions, and Snagglepussed out, exit stage right, without answering one.
The four-minute performance played like a hostage video. The idea of Garland both filing a motion to release the warrant and making a public appearance solely because of the post-raid reaction suggests he, too, was taken by surprise, and didn’t expect to be facing questions. If there was any amount of planning before the raid, this would be impossible. Yet it appeared so.
Virtually simultaneous to Garland’s bizarro presser, the Washington Post released a story entitled “FBI searched Trump’s home to look for nuclear documents and other items, sources say.” Post reporters Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Perry Stein and Shane Harris cited the ever-present “people familiar with the matter” to tell us “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” had been among the items FBI agents sought, adding the unusual raid underscored “deep concern” about “the types of information” sources thought “could be located” in Mar-a-Lago. They went on to add:
They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation.
Just throwing it out there, that the raid might have been about some other country’s nuclear secrets! The Washington Post’s anonymously-sourced stunner was the beginning and end of the nuclear secrets story, however. Not one thing has come out about it since, apart from a brief flurry of speculative features (“What nuclear secrets could Trump have possibly taken?” asked Vox, while proudly gullible Post columnist Jennifer Rubin quipped, “Leaving with nuclear secrets would be Trump’s dumbest, scariest stunt yet”).
A week after announcing their motion to unseal the Trump search warrant, Garland’s DOJ turned around to oppose the full release of the affidavit in support of the warrant. The judge, Bruce Reinhart, cited “intense public and historical interest in an unprecedented search” in ordering at least partial disclosure of the affidavit. Reinhart gave Garland’s DOJ a week to submit proposed redactions for info it wanted to keep secret, then appended his order to worry that the Justice Department could redact the document to death, making release “meaningless”:
I cannot say at this point that partial redactions will be so extensive that they will result in a meaningless disclosure, but I may ultimately reach that conclusion after hearing further from the government.
On the first weekend after the raid, official sources were telling everyone that a great part about using the Espionage Act in a Trump probe is that the law doesn’t require the involvement of classified materials. Now, we’re back to Trump not only taking secret documents, but super-secret “sensitive compartmented” ones. We’re going to hear this term, “Sensitive Compartmentalized Information” (capital S, capital C, capital I), a million times before this is over. As PBS reports:
FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate… removing 11 sets of classified documents, with some not only marked top secret but also “sensitive compartmented information,” according to a receipt of what was taken… That is a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets that if revealed publicly could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to U.S. interests.
In sum: Joe Biden didn’t know the raid was coming, Merrick Garland blamed Trump for the raid becoming public at all and took three days to take responsibility for ordering it, and Trump’s crime has moved from mishandling “nuclear documents” to keeping “Sensitive Compartmented Information,” whose possession by Trump poses “exceptionally grave” risk to the United States.
Something about all this stinks. On one hand, we’re in the same place we’ve been a hundred times in the Trump era, waiting for the big reveal. We were here before Michael Cohen’s testimony, before the Mueller report, before the Ukraine whistleblower letter, the Barr memo, and countless other expected bombshells.
On the other hand, the evidentiary hype train has been turned off early this time. The deadline for more news out of Reinhart’s court about what’s inside the affidavit is this Thursday, when Garland is supposed to submit his proposed redactions, yet the story is getting more coverage on Fox (Gutfield! incredibly surged to the top of late-night comedy ratings after the raid) than in mainstream press, which appears to be tiptoeing back from the case much as administration officials did in the first week.
Trump’s lawyers filed a rambling motion Monday to ask for a Special Master to review the documents before they’re released. A few notes about this motion. One, it started off noting that “Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run,” which not only gave an indication about Trump’s thinking but framed the issue as a political matter, essentially accusing the DOJ of raiding Trump’s home for political reasons. “The Government,” the motion read, “has refused to provide President Trump with any reason for the unprecedented general search of his home.” There’s a lot of crazy stuff in the Trump motion, but they’re not wrong about this.
Unless Garland and the Biden administration give a clear idea of what exactly precipitated the Trump raid — whether it involved Trump funneling the names of spies to Putin, leaving launch codes out on a pizza box, whatever — Trump is going to continue to hammer this issue. Unless the man is literally in manacles before November 2024, this mess will remain an open wound for Democrats. Even if the raid wasn’t politically motivated, it will for sure continue to look politically motivated, if the Justice Department doesn’t come up with a better explanation than the six or seven leaked so far. Yet everyone is acting like that question has been answered.
What gives? Even though stories like Russiagate and Ukrainegate had holes from the start, their underlying dramatic logic was consistent: Trump is guilty, and proof will be released any minute. The Mar-a-Lago raid by contrast feels like an accidental missile launch. Are we really being softened up for the DOJ ending this story without ever explaining what it had at the time of the raid? That would be bananas, and even crazier if the public accepted such an ending. This is way too big of a story to leave unexplained.
Originally posted by Matt Taibbi on Substack(subscription).
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