Aug. 17, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
The FBI raid of former President Trump weakens the Presidency
By Robert Romano
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) raid of former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla. residence, Mar-a-Lago, serves as a warning to all Republicans who are even thinking of running for President in 2024: If you win, anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law.
Even valid exercises of presidential authority under Article II of the Constitution, including former President Trump’s declassification of documents before he left office related to the Justice Department’s failed investigation of Trump that falsely accused him and his campaign of being Russian agents in 2016, and then carried the top secret investigation over into the Trump administration in 2017.
In the Jan. 19, 2021 memorandum, entitled, “Memorandum on Declassification of Certain Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” the documents — now seized by the FBI on Aug. 8 from Trump’s house — were clearly declassified. According to the Trump memorandum, “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.”
This was a lawful exercise of presidential authority to declassify military and other national security information under the Constitution’s Article II, Section 1 vesting clause: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”
In 1988, in Department of Navy v. Egan, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified that the President’s authority over classification derives from his implicit executive powers, and not any Congressional statute: “The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.’ U.S. Const., Art. II, 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security and to determine whether an individual is sufficiently trustworthy to occupy a position in the Executive Branch that will give that person access to such information flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”
In other words, any president could have declassified these documents, and it would be legitimate under the Constitution. Whether Trump, Biden or another president, the only requirement is that the exercise of authority occur while that president was in office. In this case, Trump clearly declassified the documents in question before he left office.
And yet, the Justice Department is attempting to criminalize again what was a legitimate exercise of presidential authority. Article II is not Article II anymore.
In the meantime, the Biden White House is claiming that it had no idea that the Justice Department was planning on raiding the Trump residence, with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre telling reporters on Aug. 9, “The president was not briefed, was not aware of it… No one at the White House was given a heads-up.”
Instead, it was Attorney General Merrick Garland who said he “personally approved” the raid in an Aug. 11 press conference, stating, “I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter.”
Consider the implications of that. The Justice Department and the FBI, without any consultation with the elected leader of the executive branch, President Biden, unilaterally decided to launch another criminal investigation of Trump, Biden’s political opponent and putative frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination, and to raid his house.
Biden has not fired Garland, but he should, for mere existence of the criminal investigation clearly weakens the Presidency under Article II of the Constitution. Not just former President Trump, but every president, including Biden, now must consider that acts of the President can later be turned into crimes by the next administration. It’s absurd to consider presidential powers in this way, and yet, here we are, criminalizing things the President clearly has the power to do.
The biggest losers here are the Article II Presidency under the Constitution, our two-party system and of course the American people, who now must live through the consequences of perhaps the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. By doing nothing, Biden is leaving it to the judicial branch to do what he refuses, and that is to rein in the Justice Department’s prosecution of Biden’ political opponents — and is taking the risk that the courts won’t get it wrong in the end. This is a powderkeg.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/08/the-fbi-raid-of-former-president-trump-weakens-the-presidency/
FBI has zero credibility on origins of Mar-a-Lago raid
Aug. 16, 2022, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement on the Justice Department’s ongoing failure to release the affidavit adjoining its warrant to raid former President Donald Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Fla. on Aug. 8:
“The Department of Justice owes the American people full disclosure of their rationale behind their unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago. Nothing but full and immediate disclosure is acceptable of both the warrant’s affidavit and the seized documents Trump declassified on Jan. 19, 2021 before he left office. The same set of bad actors within the Justice Department used the pretense of an ongoing investigation to block access to information related to the politically driven Crossfire Hurricane-Russia collusion hoax for years and many of the declassified documents related to that investigation were among those seized from the former president.
“The FBI has exhausted all credibility and can be presumed to be little more than a political hit squad doing the bidding of Democratic Party power brokers. America finds itself in a precarious position where its lead federal law enforcement agency is engaging in unconstitutional and dangerous actions against the Biden administration’s political opponents. Congress must defund and end this investigation before it spins out of control.”
To view online: https://getliberty.org/2022/08/fbi-has-zero-credibility-on-origins-of-mar-a-lago/
Brooke Singman: Trump 'will do whatever' he can to 'help the country' after FBI raid: 'Temperature has to be brought down'
By Brooke Singman
Former President Trump said he "will do whatever" he can "to help the country" after the FBI’s raid of his Mar-a-Lago home last week, telling Fox News Digital that the "temperature has to be brought down" while stressing that the American people are "not going to stand for another scam."
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Monday morning, his first since the raid, Trump said he had his representatives reach out to the Justice Department to offer to help amid outrage over the FBI’s unprecedented raid on his private residence last week, in which agents seized classified records, including some marked as top secret. Trump is disputing the classification of those records, saying the records have been declassified.
"The country is in a very dangerous position. There is tremendous anger, like I've never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one — years of scams and witch hunts, and now this," Trump said.
"If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that," Trump said.
"There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country — at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times," Trump said.
Trump told Fox News that his team "has not heard yet" from the Justice Department on whether they will accept his offer for help.
"I think they would want the same thing — I’ve never seen anything like this," Trump said. "It is a very dangerous time for our country."
He added: "I will do whatever I can to help the country."
Trump, reflecting on the "years of fake witch hunts and phony Russia, Russia, Russia schemes and scams," said that "nothing happens to those people who perpetuate that — nothing happens with them."
"And then they break into a president’s house — a sneak attack where it was totally — no one ever thought a thing like this would happen," Trump said.
Trump told Fox News that FBI agents "break in and take whatever they want to take."
Trump said FBI agents told his team on the Mar-a-Lago premises to "turn off the camera" and said "no one can go through the rooms."
"They could take anything they want, and put anything they want in," Trump said of the FBI agents. "My people were asked to stand outside."
Trump went on to suggest that the FBI "could have planted anything they wanted" during the raid.
"People are so angry at what is taking place," Trump said. "Whatever we can do to help — because the temperature has to be brought down in the country. If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen."
He added: "The people of this country are not going to stand for another scam."
Following the FBI’s execution of the search warrant at Trump’s home, the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a bulletin to law enforcement agencies warning of increased threats.
In the days since the warrant was executed, the FBI and DHS have seen an increase in "violent threats" against law enforcement, judiciary and government personnel, including a particular threat to "place a so-called Dirty Bomb in front of FBI headquarters," according to the bulletin.
"General calls" for "civil war" and "armed rebellion" have also increased in recent days on social media.
Several of the threats are specific, according to the bulletin, which states that "the FBI and DHS have identified multiple articulated threats and calls for the targeted killing of judicial law enforcement and government officials associated with the Palm Beach search, including the Federal judge who approved the Palm Beach search warrant."
The threat warning comes after U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart unsealed the FBI’s search warrant and property receipt from the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago. Reinhart signed the warrant on Aug. 5, giving the FBI authority to conduct its search.
According to the property receipt, reviewed before its release by Fox News Digital, FBI agents took approximately 20 boxes of items from the premises, including one set of documents marked as "Various classified/TS/SCI documents," which refers to top secret/sensitive compartmented information.
Records covered by that government classification level could potentially include human intelligence and information that, if disclosed, could jeopardize relations between the United States and other nations, as well as the lives of intelligence operatives abroad. However, the classification also encompasses national security information related to the daily operations of the president of the United States.
The property receipt also shows that FBI agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents and three sets of confidential documents.
The property receipt does not reveal any details about any of those records.
The list also includes a "leatherbound box of documents," binders of photos, handwritten notes, miscellaneous documents, miscellaneous top secret documents, miscellaneous confidential documents and other records.
The government conducted the search in response to what it believes to be a violation of federal laws: 18 USC 793 — Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information; 18 USC 2071 — Concealment, removal or mutilation; and 18 USC 1519 — Destruction, alteration or falsification of records in Federal investigations.
The allegation of "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information" falls under the Espionage Act.
The former president and his team, though, are disputing the classification and say they believe the information and records to have been declassified.
Sources familiar with the investigation told Fox News Digital that the FBI also seized boxes containing records covered by attorney-client privilege and potentially executive privilege during its raid.
Sources familiar with the investigation told Fox News Saturday that the former president’s team was informed that boxes labeled A-14, A-26, A-43, A-13, A-33, as well as a set of documents — all seen on the final page of the FBI’s property receipt — contained information covered by attorney-client privilege.
Attorney-client privilege refers to a legal privilege that keeps communications between an attorney and their client confidential.
Sources told Fox News Digital that some records could be covered by executive privilege, which gives the president of the United States and other officials within the executive branch the authority to withhold certain sensitive forms of advice and consultation between the president and senior advisers.
It is unclear, at this point, if the records include communications between the former president and his private attorneys, White House counsel during the Trump administration, or a combination.
Sources told Fox News that, due to attorney-client privilege, Trump’s team asked the Justice Department for their position on whether they would support a third party, independent special master to review those records, but sources told Fox News that the DOJ notified Trump's team that they would oppose that request.
The Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment.
Meanwhile, sources close to Trump told Fox News that the former president will soon be making an announcement about a potential presidential run in 2024.
To view online: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-he-will-do-whatever-he-can-to-help-the-country-after-fbi-raid