Doc7505
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WaPo: FBI resisted Mar-a-Lago raid, DoJ prosecutors demanded it. Why?
1 Mar 2023 ~~ By Ed Morrisey
Did the FBI get a bad rap in the wake of the raid on Mar-a-Lago? According to the Washington Post, the raid took place only after months of debate between the FBI and prosecutors from the Department of Justice. The FBI argued that a request for a full search of the property would have sufficed, according to two senior officials from the bureau.
The prosecutors wanted a raid, however, and the DoJ agreed:
Some of the field agents wanted to end the standoff altogether. FBI executives didn’t want to go that far, according to the WaPo’s sources, but they didn’t want to escalate matters with a splashy raid when a quieter and more cooperative search might have sufficed. Part of that sprang from precedents set with Hillary Clinton and blowback the bureau received over how that was handled, but part of it was concern over the political costs of escalation.
Gee, which side ended up being correct?
Prosecutors insisted that Trump was hiding highly classified material on purpose and wouldn’t cooperate with a search request anyway. The raid did find some highly classified material, but thus far not of the sort that the DoJ believed Trump held. (In fact, since the raid, the DoJ has gotten very very quiet about that material and have thus far resisted briefing Congress on it. Hmmm.) It’s not clear why prosecutors wanted a raid rather than just ask for access first, but one can bet that they wanted a big media splash more than the FBI, and the political damage to Trump that they thought it would incur.
And then the entire matter ended up backfiring on the DoJ when it turned out that Joe Biden had highly classified material at at least one of his own residences, including material from his time in the Senate, when Biden had no custodial authority at all for such retention. Even his allies among the Senate Democrat caucus expressed amazement and criticism as to how Biden ended up with that material.
The DoJ then stepped in it all over again when they declined to raid Biden’s other residences and his Senate library at the University of Delaware. Instead, they did what the FBI wanted to do with Trump in the first place: ask for permission to search his property. And the DoJ still hasn’t looked at Biden’s Senate library to see how much classified material might be stored there.
Commentary:
I’m not buying it. This is just another FBI undercover intelligence operation intended to rehabilitate their reputation via well-placed “anonymous source” lies.
There is no rehabilitation possible for the FBI; the rot is too pervasive and within its core. They need to be disbanded.
Actually all of DHS needs to be destroyed. Carefully build a much smaller, much less powerful federal investigation body with strict safeguards to protect Americans. Maybe make it “intelligence only” and use Federal Marshal Force outsourcing police powers to State Police.
