You had such a neat and easy to understand timeline and I thought you might like to add it.
Sorry if my previous comment came off as snarky, but I was really pressed for time.
Yesterday evening (Swedish time) I found that I had made a mistake in the timeline. The visit from FBI/DOJ was not on June 22 but June 3. (I took the date from a trusted web-site, but by June 22 was meant June 2022. Just goes to show that you have to check everything more than once!) Now, that does not make such a major difference, since there now exists a very good write up of the RICO case (short but to the point). The same piece contains a longer discussion regarding classified material but I leave that aside. The link is here:
The RICO suit
The disposition of classified material isn’t really what this is all about anyway.
This section, we really will keep brief. I want to address just three points. One of them is pretty big, but has gotten little if any attention. It’s at the end,
The first and easiest is that Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart – of Jeffrey Epstein defense fame – signed off on the Mar-a-Lago warrant for the U.S. District of Southern Florida a mere 44 days after recusing himself from the Trump RICO case against Hillary Clinton et al.
[NOTE BELOW!!! /SB]
The list of recusals on the Trump RICO suit is impressive. The first magistrate judge to be assigned recused the day after the case was filed in March 2022. Reinhart himself was put on the case as magistrate judge in April because his predecessor recused. Since Reinhart, three more magistrate judges have recused (here, here, and here). The current magistrate judge, Patrick M. Hunt, has hung in there for about five weeks now.
But the RICO suit has a very interesting factor of its own to enliven this recusal history. The day before Reinhart recused (that is, 21 June 2022), Trump’s counsel filed an amended complaint. The original complaint was entered in March 2022; the amended complaint is a humdinger, more than doubling the number of facts asserted in evidence.
I haven’t had time to go through all the added facts (many of which, like the originals, come from John Durham’s court filings). The amended complaint also added some defendants. It was after this filing that the exit parade of magistrate judges began.
That brings us to the second point. Also ensuing on the filing of the amended Trump complaint was a request from the U.S. Department of Justice (“United States”) to substitute itself as defendant for five of the original defendants: Comey, McCabe, Strzok, (Lisa) Page, and Clinesmith. The request was filed 14 July 2022.
Said U.S. Attorney Juan Antonio Gonzalez: “Because plaintiff’s tort claims [against the five defendants] are based upon conduct within the scope of these former FBI employees’ employment with the government, the United States is the sole and exclusive defendant for those claims. … The Court should substitute the United States as defendant for James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Kevin Clinesmith.”
Then, inevitably: “Upon substitution, the Court should dismiss the United States [as a defendant] for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.”
This was a big move by DOJ to get the Crossfire Hurricane/FISA-faking team out of the line of fire in Trump’s RICO suit. Those who aren’t following the RICO suit closely probably haven’t even heard about it. It’s interesting that DOJ asserts Kevin Clinesmith’s alleged behavior – falsifying claims for the FISA authorization on Carter Page – was conduct within the scope of his employment; but let that pass for the moment.
Here’s the really interesting thing, at point three. The trial judge, Donald Middlebrooks, granted the motion to substitute on 21 July 2022. He dismissed the FISA Five from the list of defendants and substituted the United States. But he acknowledged Trump’s right to come back with counterargument on that, and he deferred ruling on the DOJ motion for outright dismissal, after the United States was substituted.
And that’s when DOJ, which had known about the material at Mar-a-Lago for months (since at least February 2022, if not before), and had sent the FBI to look through it on 3 June 2022, actually pounced.
On 4 August, Trump filed in opposition to the judge’s 21 July decision to substitute United States and dismiss the complaint against the FISA Five. The opposition motion opened with this uncompromising Argument heading: “DEFENDANTS ARE NOT ENTITLED TO WESTFALL CERTIFICATION AS THEY ACTED OUTSIDE OF THE SCOPE OF THEIR EMPLOYMENT IN MALICIOUSLY PROSECUTING PLAINTIFF.”
The same day, Trump filed opposing Hillary Clinton’s earlier motion to dismiss the RICO complaint (the Clinton motion having been made on the basis that Trump had failed to state a claim). His counsel also answered in opposition to motions to dismiss from four other defendants.
The warrant for the Mar-a-Lago raid was requested and issued the next day, 5 August 2022.
The DOJ’s substitution move in July frankly shapes up as a tactic to put the United States into the RICO lawsuit as a defendant, where it wasn’t one before. Then it’s followed by a fishing-expedition raid on Mar-a-Lago on a remarkably thin pretext, accompanied by a barrage of wild media speculation about nuclear secrets, espionage, Saudi Arabia, and my personal favorite (so far): a theory that Trump’s possession of a file on Emmanuel Macron is connected to a scheme to give the Russians kompromat on the French president.
This is maneuver warfare going on, not the stately-paced pageant of law enforcement and jurisprudence.
It’s doubtful the purpose of leveraging the United States into the lawsuit was solely to get the suit dismissed. If that doesn’t work, there are still things the United States can do that no other defendant can, to make Trump’s life as the plaintiff difficult.
If nothing else, the raid on Mar-a-Lago will probably succeed in getting material Trump may have hoped to bring in evidence to the RICO suit stamped all over with “pending federal case.”
If you think about it, DOJ already knew what Trump had on the DOJ/FBI RICO defendants sourced from classified federal records. Trump had the information DOJ – and ODNI – already knew how to collect and assemble. Perhaps he had more than was contained in the package of declassified materials he sent to DOJ in January 2021 for publication; perhaps he had only that. If the Justice Department sought to verify such suspicions either way, it was during the FBI inspection at Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 that that was probably done.
But now, even if Trump had copies held separately and could still deploy the declassified materials to build a case for his RICO suit at trial, DOJ has its hooks in the information, and a damaging counter-narrative in the media already underway.