Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant Travesty
DOJ Unseals Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant
The warrant
that authorized the search of former President Donald
Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago was released today following our court
filing seeking release of all
FBI warrant materials.
We’re pleased that our legal pressure forced the partial release of
warrant materials about the Biden administration’s political raid on the
home of former President Trump. We expect and demand the underlying warrant
affidavit and other materials be immediately disclosed.
On August 9, we filed a motion asking the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of Florida to unseal as soon as possible the search
warrant materials used by the FBI to raid the Florida home (U.S.
v. Sealed Search Warrant (No.
9:22-mj-08332)).
The Justice Department agreed that the warrant should be released in
its filing:
The government hereby requests that the
Court unseal the Notice of Filing and its attachment (Docket Entry 17),
absent objection by former President Trump. The attachment to that Notice
consists of:
- The search warrant signed and approved by
the Court on August 5, 2022, including Attachments A and B; and
- The redacted Property Receipt listing items
seized pursuant to the search, filed with the Court on August 11,
2022
***
The press and the public enjoy a qualified
right of access to criminal and judicial proceedings and the judicial
records filed therein.
Our legal pressure forced an important first step by the Biden Justice
Department to disclose Attorney
General Garland’s role in the abusive Trump raid.
Initially, the Albany
Times Union and the New
York Times joined us in filing for the unsealing of the
warrant by filing an amicus letter and motion respectively. Other interests
later joined in the effort.
Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart had ordered the
U.S. Department of Justice to file a response to Judicial Watch’s Motion
to Unseal the warrant and supporting materials behind the FBI raid of
President Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago by 5p.m. on August 15,
2022.
Due to multiple organizations filing to unseal the warrant, Judge Reinhart
ordered that, “To avoid the need for individualized orders on any future
motion(s) to unseal, it is ORDERED that the Government shall file an
omnibus response to all motions to unseal …”
Yesterday, President Trump issued a public
statement “ENCOURAGING the immediate release of those
documents.”
Our August 9 motion stated:
Judicial Watch is investigating the
potential politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
U.S. Department of Justice and whether the FBI and the Justice Department
are abusing their law enforcement powers to harass a likely future
political opponent of President Biden.
***
The public has an urgent and substantial
interest in understanding the predicate for the execution of the
unprecedented search warrant of the private residence of a former president
and likely future political opponent…. [N]o official explanation or
information has been released about the search. As of the filing of this
motion, the public record consists solely of speculation and inuendo. In
short, the historical presumption of access to warrant materials vastly
outweighs any interest the government may have in keeping the materials
under seal.
***
Given the political context, and the highly
unusual action of executing a search warrant at the residence of a former
President and likely future political opponent, it is essential that the
public understands as soon as possible the basis for the government’s
action. Any government interest in securing the identities of witnesses and
confidential sources, if any, may be addressed by appropriate redactions
from the search warrant affidavit.
The U.S. Constitution and federal law give unreviewable authority to
President Trump to take whatever records he wishes at the end of his
presidency. The Biden administration’s dishonest depiction of personal
records of President Trump it illicitly seized during the raid as
“classified” is further demonstration that the raid was a brazen act of
raw political abuse.
Judicial Watch Sues for ‘Russia Hoax’ Records Trump
Ordered Released
The Obama-Biden administrations and Deep State spying on Trump and his
associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history.
And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking
gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an
absolute right to see!
We sued the Department of Justice for records President Trump ordered
declassified and released the day before he left office. The records relate
to “Crossfire Hurricane,” the controversial spy operation against
President Trump, his 2016 presidential campaign, and other Trump
associates, and have yet to be made public by the Biden
Administration ( Judicial
Watch, Inc. v U.S. Department of Justice (No.
1:22-cv-02264)).
We filed suit against the DOJ after it failed to respond to a February 17,
2022, FOIA request for:
All records regarding the Federal Bureau of
Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that were provided to
the White House by the Department of Justice on or about December 30, 2020.
For purposes of clarification, the records sought are those described in a
January 19, 2021 Presidential Memorandum (see https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/).
All records of communication between any official or employee of the
Department of Justice and any official or employee of any other branch,
department, agency, or office of the federal government regarding the
declassification and release of the records described in part one of this
request.
Trump’s memo authorized the declassification and release of the
records:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws
of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:
Section 1. Declassification and Release. At my request, on December 30,
2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of
materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire
Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have
remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the
public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review
could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the
binder should be released in unclassified form.
I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to
the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the
iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter
dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its
continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in
the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence
Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most
crucial to keep from public disclosure. I have determined to accept
the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that
January 17 submission.
I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my
final determination under the declassification review and I have directed
the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s
January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately
redacted copy.
My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the
limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be
protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain
personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be
protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my
direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to
ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White
House in accordance with applicable law.
A Just the News report details
that the documents include “transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of
Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an
intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main
confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the
bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal
the 2016 election.”
We have taken a leading role in uncovering the Obama/Deep State spying and
other abuses targeting Trump and his associates.
In May 2020, our litigation uncovered the “electronic
communication” (EC) that officially launched the
counterintelligence investigation, termed “Crossfire Hurricane,” of
President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The document was written by
Strzok.
In March 2019 we released heavily
redacted records from the DOJ that reveal Bruce Ohr
remained in regular contact with former British spy and Fusion GPS
contractor Christopher Steele after Steele was terminated by the FBI in
November 2016 for revealing to the media his position as an FBI
confidential informant.
In August 2019, we uncovered “302”
report material from FBI interviews with Bruce Ohr,
showing that in November 2016, Ohr said that “reporting on Trump’s ties
to Russia were going to the Clinton Campaign” and “Jon Winer at the
U.S. State Department and the FBI.” The documents also showed that Ohr
knew that Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and others were “talking to
Victoria Nuland at the U.S. State Department.” (A Form 302 is used by FBI
agents to summarize the interviews that they conduct and contains
information from the notes taken during the interview.)
In August 2018, the Justice Department (DOJ) admitted in a court
filing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court held
no hearings on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a former Trump
campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial
FISA
warrants. Our litigation also uncovered the secret FISA
warrants that confirmed the FBI and DOJ misled the courts in
withholding the material information that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and
the DNC were behind the “intelligence” used to persuade the courts to
approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team.
Also, in August of that year, we discovered FBI records
about Christopher
Steele, the former British spy, hired with Clinton campaign
and Democratic National Committee funds, who authored the infamous dossier
targeting President Trump during the presidential campaign. The documents
show that Steele was cut off as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS)
after he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to a third party. The
documents show at least 11 FBI payments to Steele in 2016 and document that
he was admonished for unspecified reasons in February 2016.
Critical Race Theory Is a Threat to Our National
Security
It’s not far-fetched to conclude that leftists are deliberately trying to
destroy our country. That could be the end result from the infusion of
Marxist thinking into our military. I explore that possibility
in this
piece published by the Washington
Examiner:
The U.S. military is being attacked from
within. But instead of rifles and tanks, the weapon being used to dismantle
our armed forces is progressive ideology.
The latest target is the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which was
established by George
Washington and is where our rising generation of Army
officers are schooled. Government watchdog Judicial Watch just uncovered
that West Point leadership has been force-feeding cadets the tenets
of critical
race theory, a Marxist theory that stokes racial
separatism.
As a result of two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the
Department of Defense, Judicial Watch forced
the release of more than 600 pages of PowerPoint slides,
handouts, and other curricula used to educate West Point cadets on topics
such as “modern day slavery in the USA.”
The documents from West Point reveal an assault on cadets in the form of
race-based shaming that paints one race as an oppressor and another as the
victim. In one presentation, for example, titled “‘Race and the
Invisible Hand’: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar
Jobs,” West Point cadets were taught that white people are malicious
oppressors. The academy’s training materials also described whiteness as
“a standpoint or place from which white people look at themselves and the
rest of society.”
Cadets were directed to “consider how the contemporary issues that relate
to race, gender, and sexuality apply to the army and how they impact the
army officer.” The materials went on to explain that CRT’s concepts
“are essential for future military officers to understand and fully
absorb.” And, if that’s not enough, students learned the fundamentals
of feminist theory and queer theory in a three-credit social sciences class
titled “The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality.”
CRT is a threat to our nation. It arises from
the Marxist intellectual framework against which the United States fought
during the Cold War. And although the U.S. defeated the imminent military
threat of Marxist communism in the 1980s, it lives on beneath the banner of
CRT and has infiltrated every aspect of American society, from cultural
institutions to the workplace and now the U.S. military. Allowing CRT to
permeate military education betrays those who fought and still defend this
nation against the Marxist totalitarian menace.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration has made critical race theory a
primary governing principle. Indeed, Gen. Darryl Williams, the West Point
superintendent responsible for the CRT abuse of the cadets in his care, was
given a fourth star by Biden and promoted to
commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa.
Congress can end this insanity, but the Democratic-controlled congress is
set to push back on any attempts to restrict CRT and its inclusion in our
military’s education programs.
It’s no wonder, then, that the U.S. Army is projected to
fall 10,000
soldiers short this fiscal year. Why would American patriots
join today’s Army, which seems too often to oppose fundamental American
values?
Thankfully, the abuse at West Point is not going unnoticed. West Point
graduates recently signed a
letter objecting to the teaching of radical agendas at the academy. The
letter points out that by teaching CRT and hosting progressive guest
speakers, West Point violated U.S. Army regulations by permitting political
activism on campus. And, as the graduates argued, CRT indoctrination at
West Point does more harm than good by placing race at the forefront of
U.S. military education.
The military has long sought to embody Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s dream that
people “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of
their character” through its commitment to character and common purpose.
In fact, the military uniform is a great equalizer that has long united
people regardless of color, class, gender, and religion. But by sowing
racial divisions between cadets, CRT fosters resentment and anger instead
of the unity essential for an effective fighting force.
Studies show that bonds of unity play a significant role on the front
lines. Nearly all soldiers report a “fused” identity with their
battalions akin to the fusion between themselves and their own family
members, according to a University of Oxford study.
When asked which group they felt most fused to, 45% of soldiers chose their
own battalions over their families. Manufacturing political and racial
tensions between cadets in training could create disastrous consequences
for battalion cohesion and Army leadership down the road — which, from
our enemies’ perspective, could be the point.
The ideological attack on West Point cadets (and the woke leadership in our
military’s other academies)
must stop. Such blatantly racist, anti-American propaganda not only
threatens to radicalize the next generation of U.S. Army leadership, but it
undermines the purpose of our military: to identify, confront, and destroy
the enemy. If critical race theory persists in the training of future
officers, they will see the enemy as their fellow American.
Leftist Attack on Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor
Orban
As we endure the brazen onslaught of leftist thinking in the United States,
it is reassuring to see that a foreign country, in an unlikely location, is
celebrating freedom and Christian, pro-family values. Chris Farrell, our
director of investigations and research, has
written about this nation, Hungary, for The
Washington Times.
The left hates that a popular, conservative government prospers in the
heart of central Europe. When that country cheerfully maintains its
sovereignty and distinct national identity while belonging to the European
Union and NATO, elites bristle. Making things worse, the country
self-identifies as a Christian, pro-family nation, and aided more than
700,000 refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine.
Hungary and the reelected Prime Minister Viktor Orban are in the crosshairs
of attack for daring to be Hungarian. “How dare they?” chuff anointed
arbiters of European moral norms, legal debate and wealth redistribution.
“Journalists” and opinion leaders are quick to join in slinging
accusations of various “-isms,” phobias and mind-reading analyses.
Adding to the indignation of the post-Western, globalists-in-charge is that
Mr. Orban was a keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action
Conference in Dallas last week. Mr. Orban gave his fearless, inspiring
speech to a packed house, well-received with standing ovations. Mr. Orban
told the Texas crowd that Hungary was the “Lone Star State of Europe,”
while engaging in brutal truth-telling that Americans almost never hear:
“If somebody has doubts whether progressive liberals and communists are
the same, just ask us, Hungarians. We fought them both, and I can tell you:
They are the same.”
“Obama … tried to force us to change the Fundamental law of Hungary,
and delete Christian and national values from it. Do you get it? The
leading power of the free world wanted to force us to change our
constitution according to a globalist liberal concept. How bizarre!”
“… Today’s progressives … separate Western Civilization from its
Christian roots once again. They are crossing a line that should never be
crossed. If you separate Western Civilization from its Judeo-Christian
heritage, the worst things in history happen.”
“To sum up: The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our
kids alone. Full stop! End of discussion!”
In the corridors of Brussels and leftist editorial Zoom meetings, the same
objective was made clear: “Mr. Orban and his message must be
stopped!”
But Mr. Orban predicted their reactions: “I can already see tomorrow’s
headlines: ‘Far-right European racist and antisemite strongman, the
Trojan horse of Putin, holds speech at conservative conference.’” Mr.
Orban was correct, because the “go-to” technique to silence anyone
making the left nervous is “the smear,” straight out of the Saul
Alinsky “Rules for Radicals,” and it often works.
Before CPAC, Mr. Orban made an annual address to the Hungarian minority in
Romania. The Washington Post and their ilk will not give you Mr. Orban’s
full quote with context, too busy saving keystrokes so they can write
“Nazi” and “authoritarian” while advocating for the EU to withhold
funds from Hungary. Here is what Mr. Orban actually said:
“The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: The
claim … that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed
race. This is a historical and semantic sleight of hand, because it
conflates two different things. There is a world in which European peoples
are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a
mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe
mix with one another, move around, work and relocate. So, for example, in
the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: We are simply a mixture of
peoples living in our own European homeland. And, given a favorable
alignment of stars and a following wind, these peoples merge together in a
kind of Hungaro-Pannonian sauce, creating their own new European culture.
This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another,
but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race. This is why we fought
at Nandorfehervar/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, and
… in still older times — the French stopped the Arabs at
Poitiers.”
Here is the essence of Mr. Orban’s statement: Europeans are from Europe;
Turks and Arabs are from their own homelands. Fundamentally, that’s it.
Various peoples are indigenous to their regions with distinct identities,
cultures, history, languages, religions. Mr. Orban was simply advocating
for the Magyar people. They are allowed to have a home and identity and
hand down their heritage through generations. France and Germany are free
to make their own decisions and value their own identity, culture, history,
language and religion — or not.
Self-determination is the freedom to choose without external compulsion —
the power of a nation to decide how it will be governed without the
influence of another country. The United Nations Charter guarantees the
right to self-determination in the framework of international law and
diplomacy.
Now is the time to consider how a country like Hungary can make choices to
advance its own interests — based on faith, family, history, culture and
tradition — without the threat of compulsion or intimidation, or
subjection to false claims of racism and bigotry as a sleazy political
trick.
Until next week …
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