If they didn't shop the warrant to a magistrate judge who should have immediately ran out of the room to find an adult, there would have been an immense problem on the hands of the DoJ to demonstrate that the warrant they were seeking wasn't ridiculously overbroad.
Does this mean they needed a warrant in the first place? If Trump was cooperating with whatever they were trying to do, absolutely not. I'd bet that important detail was hidden from the magistrate judge and not included in the affidavit as well.
Does this mean I think Trump was breaking the law with the way he declassified or stored the documents? No. The President has, for better or worse, plenary power over classified information. It could easily be described as reckless because there's no telling what sources and methods were potentially revealed from the assembled information (Executive reports rarely include detailed sources and methods, but the nature of the information in those reports could be reasonably used by adversaries to figure out how the US got the information, thereby revealing and burning millions to billions of dollars of invested spy stuff), but still, while President, it was his call to make.
I personally think the FBI was charged with conducting a "damage assessment" of the Trump Presidency on the intelligence community, and all those boxes represent the assembled evidence of that "damage" because each report could have sources and methods revealed. The DoJ decided to say "well, we're conducting a damage assessment, let's see if we can get anyone indicted along the way here."
If this were a sane and cordial government, the National Archives, the FBI, DoJ, ODNI, and Trump teams would be going over all of these documents cooperatively and ask things like "you know this report being declassified puts X, Y, and Z at risk, can we reclassify this, or reissue a tearline of the report for your records that doesn't reveal as much risk?" But the government chose a different path.
“The President has, for better or worse, plenary power over classified information. It could easily be described as reckless because there’s no telling what sources and methods were potentially revealed from the assembled information (Executive reports rarely include detailed sources and methods, but the nature of the information in those reports could be reasonably used by adversaries to figure out how the US got the information, thereby revealing and burning millions to billions of dollars of invested spy stuff), but still, while President, it was his call to make.”
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So when, exactly, did President Trump or anyone else release that information? If it isn’t released, no sources or methods could possibly have been revealed or endangered. Why do you condemn Trump for something that wasn’t done, that is only a potential problem?
You have it ass backwards. Trump was normal. The “national security establishment” was wrong. They used classification to conceal treason, sedition and their foreign collusion to cast Trump as a Russian asset. They used classification to hide their crimes in spying ON the White House.
They refused to agree that they are under the control of the executive branch and insist that THEY set policy.
They were not doing a damage assessment. It was a coverup to grab materials that Trump may have documenting their crimes. And it was also them making moves to damage the leader of the legitimate political opposition.
It is the job of the so called national security establishment to submit to the President, not for the President to follow THEIR ways.
The sources and methods being protected were the methods of sedition and treason.
The intel community has fallen into treason and suppression of dissent.
Replace the name trump with obama or HRC & what do you come up with?
We are still waiting for the damage assessments of Clinton and Obama... while paying for the damage Carter did 40+ years ago.
Here’s a twist…
“Former president Trump is not without resources and recourse in all this. Though the news media does not follow it, the Trump v Clinton lawsuit trial continues, and it might not go so well for Mrs. Clinton and her friends….
It should be pretty obvious that the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was an attempt to seize evidence likely to be used in former President Donald Trump’s civil lawsuit in the Southern Florida Federal District Court against Hillary Clinton and associated defendants in and out of government for the defamation and racketeering operation known as RussiaGate — AND in any future criminal proceedings that might grow out of congressional investigations-to-come against officials past and present in the DOJ and FBI. The idea is to tie up all those documents in a legal dispute about declassification so they can’t be entered in any proceeding.”
More at Kunstler.com
No it is not.
Obama took whatever documents he pleased from his time in the White House. No questions asked. Same with all of his predecessors.
That's all you needed to say. The rest is prolix.
What a weak, sad, and useless comment.
What? There is no defense here, especially in light of Obama, Clinton, and Hunter Biden. There is now a fourth branch of government: the Intelligence branch. That is what you’re defending.