FBI Unit Leading Mar-a-Lago Probe Earlier Ran Discredited Trump-Russia Investigation

https://www.theepochtimes.com/...XmExP%2FI30reRmZ8Nyj

In congressional testimony this month, Wray confirmed that “a number of” former Crossfire Hurricane team members are still employed at the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review. In the meantime, Wray has walled off the former Russiagate investigators only from participating in FISA wiretap applications, according to the sources.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked Wray for copies of recent case files and reports generated by Auten and whether he is included among the team the FBI has assembled to determine which of the seized Trump records fall within the scope of its counterespionage investigation and which fall outside of it.

Some former FBI officials worry that Auten, a top bureau expert on Russia and nuclear warfare, will have a hand in analyzing the boxes of documents agents seized from Trump’s home on Aug. 8 to help determine if any of the alleged Top Secret material he kept there might have been compromised, potentially putting national security at risk.

“It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. “I would substitute other analysts and agents.”

An examination of the bureau agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid reveals other connections between them and FBI officials who played key roles in advancing the Russiagate hoax.

Sources told RealClearInvestigations that Jay Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in Justice’s national security division, who happens to be a Democratic National Committee donor, has been coordinating the Mar-a-Lago investigation with Alan Kohler, who heads the FBI’s counterintelligence division.

Kohler replaced Bill Priestap in that post after Priestap stepped down from the bureau amid criticism of his role in the Russiagate probe. Kohler had worked at FBI headquarters under Priestap, specializing in countering Russian intelligence threats.

Before that, he worked in London as the FBI’s liaison with British intelligence and law enforcement. The sources say Kohler was close to Stefan Halper, an academic and longtime FBI contractor whom the bureau ran as an informant in a failed effort to suborn Trump campaign officials. He also worked closely with Stephen Somma, a lead case agent in the Crossfire Hurricane probe whom Horowitz said was “primarily responsible” for some of the worst misconduct in the FISA warrant abuse scandal. Somma is a counterintelligence investigator in the FBI’s New York field office, where he has been reassigned to the China desk.

In 2019, Kohler was promoted to special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division at the FBI’s Washington field Office, where he worked alongside then-assistant agent-in-charge Timothy Thibault, who was reassigned by Wray just days prior to the Mar-a-Lago raid, after whistleblowers raised questions about political bias. They asserted that Thibault, who has taken aim at Trump and Republicans on social media, worked with Auten to falsely discredit evidence of alleged money laundering and other activities against Hunter Biden and prevent agents from investigating them.

The Washington field office’s counterintelligence division is now run by Anthony Riedlinger, who previously worked at FBI headquarters as a section chief under Priestap. Some of the agents involved in the raid on Trump’s home came from that Washington field office, according to the sources and FBI case documents.

Bratt, the top counterintelligence official at Justice, traveled to Mar-a-Lago in early June and personally inspected the storage facility while interacting with both Trump and one of his lawyers. Trump allowed the three FBI agents Bratt brought with him to open boxes in the storage room and look through them. They left with some documents. After leaving, Bratt made a request to Trump’s lawyer for increased security at the facility and asked to see surveillance footage from the security cameras. The lawyer complied with the requests. Months went by before the Justice Department took the politically explosive step of sending FBI agents unannounced to Trump’s home, seizing documents, photos, and other items not just from the storage facility but from multiple rooms on the property, including the former president’s office.

Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said the search warrant that agents obtained is quite wide-ranging. He pointed out that it authorized the seizure of any information in any form related to “national defense information,” which he said “does not necessarily include classified material.”

“This is a huge, broad search warrant and a huge, broad investigation leveled against the former president,” Swecker said.

What’s more, he said the physical search of the former president’s residence was far more sweeping than first reported and included unsupervised snooping in several dozen bedrooms, as well as numerous storage rooms and closets, including those of the former first lady. FBI agents took numerous boxes and containers of documents and other material, including several binders of photos and even three passports held by the former president.

Although Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the DOJ seeks to “narrowly scope any search that is undertaken,” details of the warrant reveal agents had the authority to seize entire boxes of records—including those potentially covered by attorney-client privilege and executive privilege—if just a single document inside the container were marked with a classified marking.

Agents were allowed to also seize any containers or boxes “found together with” ones containing classified papers, according to ATTACHMENT B (“Property to be seized”) of the warrant. In addition, the FBI agents were given the authority to confiscate “any government and/or presidential records created between Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021,” which covers Trump’s full term in office. That meant they were able to take any item related to the Trump administration.

All told, dozens of boxes and containers were removed from Trump’s residence, very few of which actually contained classified information, the sources said.

According to Federal Election Commission records, Bratt has given exclusively to Democrats, including at least $800 to the Democratic National Committee. The sources said he is close to David Laufman, whom he replaced as the top counterintelligence official at Justice. An Obama donor, Laufman helped oversee the Russiagate probe, as well as the Clinton email case, which also involved classified information.

A Senate investigator told RCI that Laufman was the “mastermind” behind the strategy to dust off and “weaponize” the rarely enforced statutory relic—the Foreign Agents Registration Act—against Trump campaign officials, a novel legal move that the investigator noted is similar to the department’s current attempts to enforce the Presidential Records Act against Trump—which is a civil, not a criminal, statute—by invoking the Espionage Act of 1917.

Laufman signed off on the wiretapping of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which the Department of Justice inspector general determined was conducted under false pretenses involving doctored email, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and other malfeasance.

Suddenly resurfacing as a media surrogate for the Justice Department defending the Mar-a-Lago raid, Laufman has been a key source for stories by the Washington Post, CNN, and other outlets.

On CNN, for instance, he claimed the documents seized from Trump’s storage were “particularly stunning and particularly egregious,” and their discovery ”completely validates the government’s investigation” into the former president—though he quickly added, ”Whether this investigation transforms into an outright criminal prosecution remains to be seen.”

Swecker said that there is strong reason to fear that the FBI’s counterintelligence division might politicize this case.

“For sure, the FBI has dug themselves into a huge hole because of how they handled the Clinton (email) case and then Crossfire Hurricane and Hunter Biden,” Swecker said. “Myself and many of my colleagues think they are treading on very thin ice here.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, “you can’t recuse an entire FBI division.”

Patel: ‘It’s Just Insane’
Former federal prosecutor and Trump administration official Kash Patel said the FBI may have a personal interest—and a potential conflict—in seizing the records stored by Trump.

He noted that Trump in October 2020 authorized the declassification of all the investigative records generated from the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane as well as the Clinton email investigation, codenamed “Midyear Exam,” and he said that the FBI may have confiscated some of those records in its raid, ensuring they won’t be made public. In addition, he said, the agency may be digging for other documents to try to justify, retroactively, their questionable, politically-tinged 2016 opening of the Trump-Russia “collusion” case, which came up embarrassingly short on evidence.

“Tragically, the same FBI characters that were involved in Russiagate are the same counterintel guys running this ‘national security investigation’ against Trump,” said Patel, who deposed Crossfire Hurricane team members as a former House Intelligence Committee investigator.

Patel noted that the Horowitz report indicated FBI analyst Auten hid exculpatory information about Trump’s adviser Page from other investigators and the FISA court, which should be more than enough to keep him at arm’s length from other investigations involving Trump.

“And to top it all off, this guy admits [to Horowitz’s investigators] he’s unrepentant about his role in making up the biggest hoax in election history, and Wray still lets him be a supervisor at the FBI,” he said. “It’s just insane.”

The Justice Department’s national security division has ultimate authority over the grand-jury probe of Trump for possible violations of the Espionage Act, including alleged mishandling of classified material—the same statutes invoked in the Clinton email investigation. (In that case, in contrast, the FBI never searched the former secretary of state’s Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion, where she set up an unsecured basement server to send and receive at least 110 classified emails and where she also received government documents by fax.)

Former FBI counterintelligence official and lawyer Mark Wauck said he is troubled by signs that the same cast of characters from the Russiagate scandal appears to be involved in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

“If these people, who were part of a major hoax that involved criminal activity and displays of bias and seriously flawed judgment, are still involved, then that’s a major scandal,” he said in an interview.
The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.

The FBI’s nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president’s Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington—not Miami, as has been widely reported—according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau’s counterintelligence division led the 2016–2017 Russia “collusion” investigation of Trump, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team—Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten—has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian “disinformation,” an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:

quote:

They have the whole weight of the government at their disposal, plus the corrupt media on their side. Their plan is to keep bearing down on him, wearing him out until he breaks. That's my thinking. He's truly a tough nut to crack, but what is the man's limit?

Q

Its not Trump they are trying to break, it's the voters, not the far left, nor the Trump Supporters, neither will waiver.

It's about wearing down those swing voters and people who just want all of this to go away, and getting those voters to believe that the way out is, do not re-elect DJT.

The noise is the attack, not anything they will or will not find, it's the constant noise...

Sorry for the late response to this but I've been in the hospital undergoing more medical procedures...

Even though I would love nothing more than another 4 years of "my president" DJT, I must admit to feeling worn down by all of the attacks and political theater! I am one of those who is really wanting it all to just go away! I still consider Trump as THE best president during my 61 years on this planet, and I am proud to have voted for him and will continue to support him until death, but dammit, I just want the LEFT to be what "goes away" and leave the guy and his family alone!!!

At this point in time, I'm leaning towards Desantis for prez and let Trump kick Dimocrat ass behind the scenes. Convince me I'm wrong and I'll retract this statement...

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:

quote:

Originally posted by Flash-LB:
[…]unintended consequences….

I’ve been thinking about that book a lot lately. It’s long out of print and copies are anywhere from $70 to $600 on Amazon, but a pdf now exists for those who haven’t read it. If nothing else, it’s an interesting read.

https://billstclair.com/Unintended-Consequences.pdf

I was just talking about this the other day.
I would love to read a reprise of the book but with the actual internet and wireless technology we have today.

UC is a great book.

quote:

Originally posted by bronicabill:

At this point in time, I'm leaning towards Desantis for prez and let Trump kick Dimocrat ass behind the scenes. Convince me I'm wrong and I'll retract this statement...

That's fine with me. Go with your man in the primaries. All I ask is that when it comes time for the General election, you're 100% behind the Republican nominee.

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:

quote:

Originally posted by Flash-LB:
[…]unintended consequences….

I’ve been thinking about that book a lot lately. It’s long out of print and copies are anywhere from $70 to $600 on Amazon, but a pdf now exists for those who haven’t read it. If nothing else, it’s an interesting read.

https://billstclair.com/Unintended-Consequences.pdf

You can still get a paperback copy.

https://stlccw.com/product/uni...sequences-softcover/

The fact is, whoever is the Republican Presidential Nominee, the Dims, their Lame Stream Media, and Weaponized Just Us Department (with the FBI and IRS leading the charge or charges) will be coming after them. This is the Dim's playbook now and they will go after the nominee tooth and nail, along with trying for absentee ballots again. Remember it was three shady counties in three different states that decided this election.

This raid was just to cast the "cloud of suspicion" on Trump using media innuendo and "reliable information from anonymous sources close to the investigation", trying to get him to back down. I don't know Trump but he hasn't shown he is the type of person to back down or run from a fight.

The funny thing is EVERYTHING Trump has ever said has been proven true. I know for fact of large election fraud (homeless people signed up multiple times for absentee ballots with like 800+ ballots going to a single address and all 800 were turned in, with none of the homeless people seeing those ballots) in St. Louis County MO, though it wasn't enough to tilt the state to Bidet. I know 800 ballots doesn't seem like a lot but what if is was 5 or 10 or 100 addresses with 800 absentee ballots being sent out to each address, now we are talking some big numbers

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by bronicabill:

At this point in time, I'm leaning towards Desantis for prez and let Trump kick Dimocrat ass behind the scenes. Convince me I'm wrong and I'll retract this statement...

That's fine with me. Go with your man in the primaries. All I ask is that when it comes time for the General election, you're 100% behind the Republican nominee.

Yep! I'm leaning DeSantis too because I would prefer a younger president after withering Joe but who ever the republicans decide on in the primaries will get my vote!

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the Trump supporters will not hesitate getting behind a Ron Desantis or whoever ends up on the ticket even if its not Trump.

quote:

Its not Trump they are trying to break, it's the voters, not the far left, nor the Trump Supporters, neither will waiver.

It's about wearing down those swing voters and people who just want all of this to go away, and getting those voters to believe that the way out is, do not re-elect DJT.

The noise is the attack, not anything they will or will not find, it's the constant noise...

*****************************************************************

Sorry for the late response to this but I've been in the hospital undergoing more medical procedures...

Even though I would love nothing more than another 4 years of "my president" DJT, I must admit to feeling worn down by all of the attacks and political theater! I am one of those who is really wanting it all to just go away! I still consider Trump as THE best president during my 61 years on this planet, and I am proud to have voted for him and will continue to support him until death, but dammit, I just want the LEFT to be what "goes away" and leave the guy and his family alone!!!

At this point in time, I'm leaning towards Desantis for prez and let Trump kick Dimocrat ass behind the scenes. Convince me I'm wrong and I'll retract this statement...

This is their goal. To make DJT unelectable because people are tired of the drama. But who created the drama? We all know who.

The only difference is that DJT didn't roll over for them, like McCain and Romney did in prior elections. The two of them folded like cheap suits against the Commie Obama and refused to fight to win. They took the "high road" while Obama's Chicago dirty tricks machine tore them apart. DJT never gave in, and never gave up.

I like DeSantis - he is very smart, has an impeccable resume, and can stand up to the Commmies and throw their BS back in their faces. But I am just not confident he can win the Presidency against the uniparty opposition.

Biden White House facilitated DOJ's criminal probe against Trump, scuttled privilege claims: memos

https://justthenews.com/politi..._campaign=newsletter

"I have therefore decided not to honor the former President's 'protective' claim of privilege," acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall wrote Trump's team in May.

Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump's estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president's claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump's Florida home.

By May, Su conveyed to the Archives that President Joe Biden would not object to waiving his predecessor's claims to executive privilege, a decision that opened the door for DOJ to get a grand jury to issue a subpoena compelling Trump to turn over any remaining materials he possessed from his presidency.

The machinations are summarized in several memos and emails exchanged between the various agencies in spring 2022, months before the FBI took the added unprecedented step of raiding Trump's Florida compound with a court-issued search warrant.

The most complete summary was contained in a lengthy letter dated May 10 that acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall sent Trump's lawyers summarizing the White House's involvement.

"On April 11, 2022, the White House Counsel's Office — affirming a request from the Department of Justice supported by an FBI letterhead memorandum — formally transmitted a request that NARA provide the FBI access to the 15 boxes for its review within seven days, with the possibility that the FBI might request copies of specific documents following its review of the boxes," Wall wrote Trump defense attorney Evan Corcoran.

That letter revealed Biden empowered the National Archives and Records Administration to waive any claims to executive privilege that Trump might assert to block DOJ from gaining access to the documents.

"The Counsel to the President has informed me that, in light of the particular circumstances presented here, President Biden defers to my determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not I should uphold the former President's purported 'protective assertion of executive privilege,'" Wall wrote. "... I have therefore decided not to honor the former President's 'protective' claim of privilege."

The memos provide the most definitive evidence to date of the current White House's effort to facilitate a criminal probe of the man Joe Biden beat in the 2020 election and may face again as a challenger in 2024. That involvement included eliminating one of the legal defenses Trump might use to fight the FBI over access to his documents.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and the committee's likely chairman if the GOP win control of Congress in November, called the Biden White House's involvement and privilege waiver "amazing news" with implications for past and future presidents.

"Look, the left, they've been out to get President Trump because President Trump's a threat to the clique, to the swamp, to the bureaucracy, to the deep state," Jordan told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show Tuesday night. "Whatever term you want to use. And they all know it.

"That's why they were out to get him before he was in office, and they set up the whole Russia collusion hoax. It's why they tried to get him while he was in office. And of course, obviously they continue to do so now that he's left. It's just never going to end."

Alan Dershowitz, the famed Harvard law professor emeritus and lifelong Democrat, reviewed some of the correspondence at Just the News' request. He said the Biden White House's eagerness to waive Trump's claims of privilege could have future implications for generations of presidents to come.

"I was very surprised," Dershowitz said after reading the text of Wall's letter. "The current president should not be able to waive the executive privilege of a predecessor, without the consent of the former president. Otherwise, [privilege] means nothing. What president will ever discuss anything in private if he knows the man who beat him can and will disclose it."

While some courts have upheld the notion of a successor president waiving privilege for a predecessor, Dershowitz said the matter remains to be decided definitively by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"The best thinking is that an incumbent president cannot waive the right of the previous president," he said in a phone interview with Just the News. "It would make a mockery of the whole notion of privilege."

In her letter, Wall told Corcoran the Biden administration believes a Watergate era ruling suggested Biden had the authority to waive Trump's privileges.

"The Supreme Court's decision in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), strongly suggests that a former President may not successfully assert executive privilege 'against the very Executive Branch in whose name the privilege is invoked,'" she wrote. That ruling, however, was issued under an earlier predecessor law for presidential records and in the immediate aftermath of one of America's worst presidential scandals.

The correspondence reviewed by Just the News also provides a contemporaneous window into what the National Archives (NARA) found when it first got boxes of documents returned from Trump's compound in February 2022. Those boxes had been packed up by the General Services Administration as Trump was leaving the White House on Jan. 20, 2021.

"In its initial review of materials within those boxes, NARA identified items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials," Wall wrote. "NARA informed the Department of Justice about that discovery, which prompted the Department to ask the President to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the boxes at issue so that the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community could examine them."

The correspondence and emails show Corcoran had a phone conversation with Su about privilege claims in the spring, with Trump's lawyers raising concerns that some of the materials were subject to Trump's claims of executive privilege.

"We have requested the ability to review the documents," Corcoran wrote National Archives General Counsel Gary Stern on April 29, copying Su on the letter. "That review is necessary in order to ascertain whether any specific document is subject to privilege. We would respectfully request that you restrict access to the documents until we have had the opportunity to review the documents and to consult with President Donald J. Trump so that he may personally make any decision to assert a claim of constitutionally based privilege."

But a dozen days later, Wall informed Corcoran that she had the blessing of Biden to overrule those privilege claims and share all materials requested by the DOJ and FBI.

"The White House Counsel's Office acquiesced in an extension of the production date to April 29, and so advised NARA," she wrote. "In accord with that agreement, we had not yet provided the FBI with access to the records when we received your letter on April 29, and we have continued to refrain from providing such access to date.

"It has now been four weeks since we first informed you of our intent to provide the FBI access to the boxes so that it and others in the Intelligence Community can conduct their reviews. Notwithstanding the urgency conveyed by the Department of Justice and the reasonable extension afforded to the former President, your April 29 letter asks for additional time for you to review the materials in the boxes.

"Accordingly, I have consulted with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel to inform my 'determination as to whether to honor the former President's claim of privilege or instead to disclose the Presidential records notwithstanding the claim of privilege.' ... I have therefore decided not to honor the former President's 'protective' claim of privilege."

Within a couple of weeks of Wall's letter to Corocoran, the DOJ sent a grand jury subpoena to Trump's team demanding the return of any remaining national security documents, which precipitated a voluntary visit by the FBI to Mar-a-Lago on June 3, when agents picked a small amount of materials Trump's lawyers said were responsive to the subpoena

Two months later, the FBI escalated again, seeking a search warrant to raid the Trump estate on Aug. 8.

From Google Maps. Some ass has labeled Mar A Lago "Home of Benedict Arnold II"
https://www.google.com/maps/@2...2,-80.0373754,18.08z

And it's still there. I had thought someone at Google would have removed it by now but wishful thinking on my part I guess.

quote:

Originally posted by Bulldog7972:
And it's still there. I had thought someone at Google would have removed it by now but wishful thinking on my part I guess.

I'm sure Google approves, and will take their sweet old time taking it down.

quote:

Originally posted by Ironbutt:

quote:

Originally posted by Bulldog7972:
And it's still there. I had thought someone at Google would have removed it by now but wishful thinking on my part I guess.

I'm sure Google approves, and will take their sweet old time taking it down.

Yeah, labeling "Brandon Falls" is 'hate speach' ( ) but this will be seen as 'Freedom of Speach' and protected.

Whatever. Let the libtards screech and wail.

With absolutely no apologies to the Star Wars nerds among us.

Litigation By Leak: Government Officials Drop New Details On Mar-a-Lago Raid While Continuing To Oppose Disclosures In Court

https://jonathanturley.org/202...isclosures-in-court/

One of the most glaring contradictions in the Mar-a-Lago controversy has been the Justice Department demanding absolute and unwavering secrecy over the FBI raid while officials have been leaking details on the raid. The latest example is a report in the New York Times that the Justice Department recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings, citing multiple sources connected to the investigation. Most judges would be a tad annoyed by the contradiction as the government continues to frame the public debate with its own selective leaks while using secrecy to bar other disclosures. That includes sections of the affidavit that detail the communications with the Trump team, information that is already known to the target.

Someone is clearly lying. The Trump Team said that it was cooperating and would have given access to the government if it raised further objections. The Justice Department has clearly indicated that time was of the essence to justify this unprecedented raid on the home of a former president. Yet, Attorney General Merrick Garland reportedly waited for weeks to sign off on the application for a warrant and the FBI then waited a weekend to execute that warrant. It is difficult to understand why such communications could not be released in a redacted affidavit while protecting more sensitive sections.

The latest leak to to the New York Times offers details on what was gathered from Mar-a-Lago. Officials state that they collected more than 150 documents marked as classified in January with another 150 being gathered in June and then in the August raid.

Washington has long floated on a sea of leaks but this is notable in that the government is opposing even modest disclosures from the court while it has steadily leaked details to its own advantage. It undermines the credibility of the government and raises questions of the motivations behind the absolute secrecy claims.

The level of detail is extraordinary including the very account of past dealings that some of us have argued could be released in the affidavit. The leaks describe the June meeting in Mar-a-Lago and reveals that Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the national security division of the Justice Department, met with two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb. He then went through the boxes himself to identify classified material.

This information is likely contained in the affidavit, which the Justice Department claimed could not be released without harming its investigation and endangering national security.

The New York Times story then affirms the position of the Justice Department as proven by the leaks.

“[T}he extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Mr. Trump left office, suggested to officials that the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators, or both.”

It is litigation by leak where the government prevents others (including the target) from seeing key representations made to the court while releasing selective facts to its own advantage. It shows utter contempt for the court and the public. The question is whether the court will take note of this series of leaks. Most judges do not like to be played so openly and publicly by government officials. Moreover, the leaks should push Garland to reverse course as suggested in a recent column and order substantive disclosures in the affidavit in light of the government’s prior leaks.

quote:

Originally posted by Ironbutt:
From Google Maps. Some ass has labeled Mar A Lago "Home of Benedict Arnold II"
https://www.google.com/maps/@2...2,-80.0373754,18.08z

Cute.

quote:

Originally posted by bronicabill:
Sorry for the late response to this but I've been in the hospital undergoing more medical procedures...

Even though I would love nothing more than another 4 years of "my president" DJT, I must admit to feeling worn down by all of the attacks and political theater! I am one of those who is really wanting it all to just go away! I still consider Trump as THE best president during my 61 years on this planet, and I am proud to have voted for him and will continue to support him until death, but dammit, I just want the LEFT to be what "goes away" and leave the guy and his family alone!!!

At this point in time, I'm leaning towards Desantis for prez and let Trump kick Dimocrat ass behind the scenes. Convince me I'm wrong and I'll retract this statement...

And at this point I'd run through the fires of hell to vote for Trump again. "The noise" only tends to anger me more and make me more resolute about voting. If Trump causes this amount of pain, suffering, and fear for the liberal filth and their MSM and government sycophants, then he's my man for president.

quote:

"The Counsel to the President has informed me that, in light of the particular circumstances presented here, President Biden defers to my determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not I should uphold the former President's purported 'protective assertion of executive privilege,'" Wall wrote. "... I have therefore decided not to honor the former President's 'protective' claim of privilege."

What a complete and total load of BS. So some librarian now has the bequeathed power to revoke a prior President of the Unites States executive privilege? Yeah, right. What a load of crap. This administration is beyond asinine.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

That's fine with me. Go with your man in the primaries. All I ask is that when it comes time for the General election, you're 100% behind the Republican nominee.

This, in spades and multiplied by 1000.

I do not care if I agree with individual policies espoused by the R nominee, whoever it is. I do not care if I find the R nominee personally offensive. I do not care if there are videos of the R nominee fileting and deep-frying virgins while dancing naked with familiars around the bonfire. I am voting for whoever the D candidate ISN'T.

There is a short list of who I prefer the nomineee to be-- DJT and DeSantis are both on it-- but the ultimate answer is, "whoever the D nominee isn't" in the general election. Fight like hell to keep the RINOs and turncoats off the General ballot, but at the election, close ranks. Shield wall. Not an inch backward. Slaughter them all.

Every race. Every office. Forever.