The high stakes of the FBI searching Trump's house

Mwalimu-G

Elder Lister
Yet another long national nightmare
Image
Aides carrying boxes to Marine One before then-President Donald Trump departed the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2021.
----------
“You come at the king, you best not miss.”

The words of Omar Little, the stick-up king in HBO’s revered Baltimore crime drama “The Wire” come to mind as Washington reels from the revelation that FBI agents enacted a search warrant on former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach palace.

The magnitude of federal agents sweeping into a former President’s home is impossible to overstate. The political and legal stakes for the bureau and the Justice Department are now equally large: They'd better have the goods on Trump to justify such an escalatory step. It's unprecedented for the Feds to search the home of an ex-president — not to mention a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Because the stakes are so immense, it's unimaginable that the Mar-a-Lago search was precipitated solely by a clerical issue of missing presidential documents that should have been locked up for safe-keeping in the National Archives. What were the FBI and the Justice Department looking for? The only people who really know the extent of the former President’s exposure are not telling. The Justice Department has a policy of not commenting on ongoing investigations. Trump would have a copy of the search warrant, but he’s not saying what it refers to.

We know that the search pertains to certain documents that Trump retained from his presidency and could include classified information potentially in violation of various laws and presidential records legislation. It’s also clear that on an issue this sensitive, given the ex-President’s profile and record of inciting political uproar and even violence to further his political ends, the search must have been signed off at the highest levels of the FBI and the Justice Department.

Many Republicans, reflecting a fervent sense of fury long fanned by conservative media and Trump’s election lies, have accused the Biden administration of weaponizing justice to harm a rival. None of them know the details of the case, but their lockstep support is a sign of the enduring power of Trump’s personality cult. (It's also worth noting that many of the Republicans crying foul now were prominent in demanding the disqualification of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information.)

Yet Trump’s defenders are missing these two points. Even former presidents are not above the law. And the FBI couldn't just show up at Mar-a-Lago on a hunch — in order to get a warrant, they would have had to show a federal judge that there was probable cause to believe that a crime had been committed, and that the residence contained evidence to prove it.

It’s too early to know how this all plays out. But it’s a perilous moment for Trump. It’s an even even darker moment for the United States as a whole, likely to tarnish the reputation of US institutions of justice in the eyes of millions of Americans in Trump's thrall — even if he is found guilty of a serious criminal offense. The next presidential election will have its credibility called into question. And an already bitterly divided nation will be further torn apart.
 
Top