Mar-a-Lago Affidavit Has Same Fatal Flaw Found in Botched FISA Warrants
You know what they say — history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
And when you consider how this month’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence compares to the Russian collusion probe, it appears the FBI is a master of such verse.
On Friday, the Department of Justice released the heavily redacted affidavit behind the FBI raid of Trump’s Palm Beach home after a federal judge rejected its attempts to keep the document sealed.
As it turns out, the justification for the unprecedented search bears an eerie — though hardly surprising — resemblance to the FBI’s now-notoriously dubious basis for seeking FISA warrants to surveil the 2016 Trump campaign team.
According to John Solomon of Just the News, a longtime Russian collusion hoax hawk, the affidavit appears to have relied on media reports from a local CBS outlet and Breitbart, just as the FISA warrant application relied on reports from Yahoo News.
You may recall that Yahoo, just like federal intelligence agencies pursuing warrants to spy on Trump, was informed by one Christopher Steele, a now-disgraced former British intelligence operative who was hired by the Democratic National Committee to compose “the dossier,” a piece of political opposition research that formed the basis for the DOJ’s Trump-Russia collusion probe.
In the case of the warrant used to search Mar-a-Lago, the FBI cited a January 2021 report from CBS that claimed moving trucks had been seen outside the private resort. (It is unclear why this was remarkable in January 2021, when the former president and first lady were moving from Washington, D.C., to… Mar-a-Lago).
The affidavit also cited a May Breitbart report in which former top Trump official Kash Patel said that the media was being “misleading” about the former president’s possession of allegedly classified documents.
Solomon pointed out that the DOJ’s internal watchdog, when examining the basis for the FISA warrants behind the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, sharply criticized their use of media reports.
I mean, is anyone surprised?
Ever since the historic 2016 campaign, the federal intelligence apparatus has hardly demurred from showing its true colors and its ability to be weaponized by the establishment for political gain. The Mar-a-Lago raid has felt like a bad movie sequel this whole time, and now we know that it basically was.
The affidavit also pointed to a number of documents turned over to the National Archives by Trump in January that were marked as “classified” or “top secret,” but Trump has noted his own powers to declassify documents in his possession.
Trump also noted that the unredacted portions of the affidavit contained no reference to nuclear documents allegedly stored at Mar-a-Lago after a Washington Post report citing an unnamed source indicated this was behind the raid.
“Affidavit heavily redacted!!! Nothing mentioned on ‘Nuclear,’ a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ, or our close working relationship regarding document turnover – WE GAVE THEM MUCH,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
If the last six years have taught us anything, it is that the establishment media and federal government use a dangerous brand of circular reasoning to undermine the integrity of our law enforcement mechanisms.
It began with Trump, but since President Joe Biden took office, the DOJ has proven that it is not above targeting parents who object to critical race theory being taught in public schools while the IRS is hiring tens of thousands of new employees and training many of them to shoot to kill.
If recent history rhymes so closely with itself, what does that say about how the current administration might pair with previous governments that were willing to weaponize agencies for political hits?
That is a rhyme I do not care to hear.
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