The FBI searched Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate as part of an investigation into whether he took classified records from the White House to his Florida residence.
Video / AP / CNBC
OPINION:
There has been a great deal of performative hyperventilation among Donald Trump's supporters in the days since the FBI executed a search warrant at his home in Florida.
As we have since learned from the unsealed warrant, law enforcement agents were looking for US government documents, which Trump – who is now a private citizen – had allegedly taken to Mar-a-Lago illegally when he left the White House.
The court has also unsealed a property receipt Trump received after the search, which lists the items the FBI took, including "confidential", "secret" and "classified/TS/SCI" documents.
The acronyms there stand for "Top Secret" and "Sensitive Compartmentalised Information", which is restricted to a small number of individuals with top security clearance and is usually stored in specially designed facilities.
Apparently, the US government felt such sensitive material should be housed in a location more secure than the basement of a luxury resort frequented by rich foreign nationals.
Now, because American political discourse is currently dominated by otherwise intelligent people pretending to be outraged about things they know full well are not outrageous, the reaction to the FBI raid has been less than sober.
Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Photo / Getty Images
"Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from Third World Marxist dictatorships," said Senator Marco Rubio, for example.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – who is widely viewed as the frontrunner for his party's presidential nomination in 2024, should Trump decide to stay out of the race – said the raid was "another escalation in the weaponisation of federal agencies against the regime's political opponents".
"Banana republic," he added for emphasis.
You will note the very deliberate use, and capitalisation, of "regime", which is the word we typically use to describe the governments of murderous dictators.
"The way our federal government has gone, it's like what we thought about the Gestapo," said Senator Rick Scott, with the inevitable invocation of the Nazis. There's always one.
"They just go after people. (It's like) what we thought about the Soviet Union. This cannot be our country," he said.
Given this rhetoric, which is coming from Republican politicians who are very much in the mainstream, I suppose we need to ask ourselves, in all seriousness, whether the FBI's actions here are indeed an echo of Hitler and Stalin.
So, here is what happened, based on the information publicly available to us. Keep an eye out for the Gestapo parallels.
As mentioned, the FBI believed Trump was illegally keeping sensitive documents with ramifications for US national security at Mar-a-Lago.
These documents were the property of the US government, not the former president. Multiple efforts were made to have Trump return them voluntarily.
The National Archives had been communicating with his team since 2021, seeking their recovery. In January of this year, he handed over 15 boxes' worth, though the Archives said at the time there were additional documents missing.
Former US President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Hilton Anatole. Photo / Getty Images
During the American spring, Trump was served with a subpoena from a federal grand jury demanding the return of the documents that allegedly remained in his possession. In June, his team met with Justice Department officials in person to discuss the matter.
These "less intrusive" efforts, as Attorney-General Merrick Garland described them this week, did not yield results. Law enforcement believed Trump still had the documents in question and was failing to return them.
So eventually, the FBI and Justice Department sought a search warrant.
To obtain one, they had to go to a federal judge to explain what investigators would be looking for and where they expected to find it. They had to convince the judge there was probable cause that evidence of breaches of specific laws would be found.
The judge granted that search warrant, and with the approval of Garland, who heads the Justice Department, the FBI conducted its search on Monday.
Now, is it possible that the FBI's premise for the search warrant was flimsy, and that the judge was wrong to sign off on it? Yes. The unsealed warrant does not include the argument that convinced the judge there was probable cause, so we cannot critique it.
Is it possible that investigators were motivated by politics rather than other considerations, such as national security? Yes.
Neither possibility should be ruled out until we have full knowledge of the facts.
As things stand, however, there is no evidence to support either assertion. What we have instead is a procession of Trump's supporters calling the search corrupt and politically motivated based on precisely nothing.
They want to believe it was unjust, and therefore they do.
The facts of the case, as we currently understand them, are this: Trump kept national security documents he did not own after leaving office. In blunter words, he is alleged to have stolen them. When this was brought to the former president's attention, he failed to hand over all the documents.
Law enforcement and government officials tried to retrieve them via more subtle methods, and when they continued to be stonewalled, they resorted to using a search warrant.
What else was the government supposed to do in this situation? Accept that SCI-level national security documents were being stored at a hopelessly vulnerable location?
Trump now insists he "declassified" all the documents in question before leaving office, though there is no evidence of this actually has happened. And it doesn't matter anyway. The point here is, as a private citizen, the documents don't belong to him, whether they are highly classified or not. He has no reason to be keeping them at Mar-a-Lago.
Why, when informed of this, did he fail to hand them over? We have no answer.
Many of those defending Trump now, the former president included, are the same people who spent the 2016 campaign implying Hillary Clinton should be jailed for mishandling classified information by using a private email server when she was secretary of state.
It's almost as though they think the rule of law should apply only to their political opponents.
And that double standard brings us to another weird argument to which Trump's supporters have cleaved this week.
Several Republican politicians have said essentially the same thing, but here is the version from Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn: "If the FBI can do this to President Trump, they can do it to you."
Unlike the earlier comparisons to Nazis, Third World countries and banana republics, this is at least a true statement.
Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Photo / Getty Images
It is, however, the wrong way around, and hence misses the most fundamental and obvious point of this entire saga.
The real principle at stake here is this: if they can do it to you, they should be able to do it to a former president, or in Australia's case a former prime minister. Because in an egalitarian society, the rule of law is supposed to apply to everyone, including the rich and powerful.
It is of course true that if a regular, no-name American citizen were storing these documents at his house, the FBI would seek and execute a search warrant to retrieve them. Obviously. No one would consider that improper.
The statutes cited in the search warrant carry jail sentences. Regular people have spent years in prison for violating them.
Yet under the same circumstances, we are told that the execution of a legally acquired search warrant at Trump's home is corrupt and tyrannical and an affront to human liberty.
If it is your opinion that law enforcement should not have searched Mar-a-Lago, despite believing the property was illegally housing these documents, then you are saying former presidents should be treated differently under the law, if not exempted from it entirely.
To which the natural follow-up question is: why? What makes a former politician any more special than a former cop, a former doctor, or a former plumber? Why should someone get special legal privileges because they happened to have a career in what is, let's be honest, a notoriously untrustworthy profession?
Perhaps your stance is a touch more pragmatic, and in line with the view expressed by The Wall Street Journal's editorial board this week.
"The Justice Department is unleashing political furies it cannot control and may not understand, and the risks for the department and the country are as great as they are for Trump," the paper argued.
In other words, law enforcement should have been reluctant to execute the search warrant because of the inevitable, furious reaction from Trump's supporters.
Here is a better idea: law enforcement shouldn't give a damn about the politics of this situation, or any situation. It should act to uphold the law. Simple as that.
Unless any evidence to the contrary emerges, that appears to be what happened here.
