Posted on 08/15/2022 9:40:14 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
As RedState reported on Monday, Donald Trump accused the FBI of taking his passports during the unprecedented raid of his Florida residence. According to the former president, three passports were taken during the search, which apparently went far beyond just recovering supposedly classified documents that threatened “national security.”
Predictably, after Trump made the claim, the press quickly jumped into the fray to call him a liar. Norah O’Donnell of CBS News claimed via a source that the FBI was “not in possession of former President Trump’s passports.”
NEW: According to a DOJ official, the FBI is NOT in possession of former President Trump's passports. Trump had accused the FBI of stealing his three passports during the search of his Mar-a-Lago home.
— Norah O'Donnell 🇺🇸 (@NorahODonnell) August 15, 2022
When I saw that report from O’Donnell, I put out my own post questioning the phrasing. “Not in possession of” is very specific wording that could have simply meant the FBI had passed them on to another agency. Why not just say “we didn’t take the passports” if they didn’t take the passports?
Well, as it turns out, Trump’s team was ready and waiting with the receipts that showed the press narrative was a falsehood.
This is how Fake News works, folks. Biden admin actively feeds half truths & lies that the media willingly amplifies—advancing a partisan narrative to attack Trump.@NorahODonnell, did your “source” read you this email? Did you bother asking if they indeed seized the passports? https://t.co/DlzkagN0ie pic.twitter.com/VwCU7DPCvg
— Taylor Budowich (@TayFromCA) August 15, 2022
Incredibly (or perhaps not so), instead of admitting their mistake, members of the press rushed out to somehow make the revelation about…Trump’s supposed dishonesty.
So Trump team now publicizing this email, which shows:
1) DOJ obtained three passports (two expired, not one, as Trump said) and alerted Trump lawyers
2) They were recovered by a filter team, which weeds out privileged info.
3) Trump publicized this after DOJ offered them back
pic.twitter.com/lz8wneIQ0a— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 15, 2022
So let me get this straight. The FBI did indeed seize Trump’s passports, which seems incredibly improper given what was legally allowed to be taken by the warrant, and that’s somehow his fault? A passport is not something you just accidentally grab, thinking it’s a presidential record. It’s the kind of thing that an agent purposely took and knew exactly what they were taking. Yet, the big gotcha here is that Trump was wrong about the expiration date on one of the passports. It’s absurd.
The big story here is that the FBI took the passports in the first place. It is not that Trump shared an email that ended up embarrassing the bureau’s leadership, who were apparently content to keep lying about the matter via leaks until the former president exposed them. Now, the mainstream media wants to pretend like the seizure was just an honest mistake that shouldn’t be held against the FBI. Yeah, that’s not how any of this works.
Trump: “They stole my passport.”
Liberals: “Trump is lying.”
FBI: “We took his passports and are returning them.”
Liberals: “See? Trump always lies.”
WHAT?
— Bob Weave (@lowkeyrbe) August 16, 2022
The press and the DOJ working together to push a false narrative isn’t surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less improper and corrupt. There need to be answers provided for how the FBI ended up with Trump’s passports when they obviously weren’t part of what was sought and allowed to be taken in the warrant. O’Donnell and the rest of the press who ran with that lie that the FBI didn’t have the passports also need to answer for why they swallowed a statement from the DOJ without even bothering to get any corroborating details.
With every passing day, the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago looks worse and worse. We are living under a regime that prides itself in operating like a banana republic. The dishonesty of those always out to get the orange man knows no bounds.
As always, they have nothing to lose by persecuting Donald Trump. It drains his team’s time and resources, and it provides endless negative press coverage that the Democrats’ voting base will gobble up and become emboldened by.
Time to hut this corrupt organization
Further, they need to release the affidavit and full inventory; returning everything.
The DOJ source must be laughing their ass off over feeding O’Donnell bad intel.
So the FBI and media are lying again
And "Our Side" cheers them on. This will not end well for the GOP. Do they WANT to keep Pelosi in power?
I disagree.
It provides more ammunition for his team to use against the deep state.
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.”
——————
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?
If Trump regains the presidency, I hope he has a great Attorney General. Although, the senate may not allow him to have a great AG.
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.
Did 45 declassify documents showing bad faith/traitorous activities that were marked “TOP SECRET-CODEWORD” by the radical Obama/Biden administration?
And Biden has to continue HIDING such by classifying it “TOP SECRET”?
Yes. They do. Then they can enrich themselves through fundraising and not have to actually *do* anything.
If they can do it to Trump....they can do it to anyone...including ammodotcom.
Nora O’Donnell. A vacuous airhead, pretty but sickening like poison ivy.
Lies like a Kamala Harris mattress.
I’m of the opinion that dumping the keebler elf for Bagpipes Bushie Barr was the worse thing he could do.
atleast Sessions has kept pretty quiet.
Replace the name trump with obama or HRC & what do you come up with?
“If Trump regains the presidency, I hope he has a great Attorney General. Although, the senate may not allow him to have a great AG.”
Much of that depends on how hard we’re trying to, you know, “Teach the GOP a lesson” (as in giving the Democrats the two Georgia seats after 2020 steal from Trump), or only electing Republicans of the “highest moral character” (and thereby not voting for Roy Moore or other Republicans with somewhat spotty pasts).
We keep doing that shit and we’ll keep losing seats and wondering why the country is going to hell.
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