USA 2020 Elections: Thread

[grarpamp]

> https://donaldjtrump.com/
> It's Watergate in reverse.
> The real question is not about posession,
> but about what is in the docs?

Taibbi: Welcome To The Third World

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-third-world
https://twitter.com/KayvonAfshari/status/1556796362510852096

Secret service outside Mar-a-Lago Monday

[The Justice Department] must immediately explain the reason for its
raid and it must be more than a search for inconsequential archives,
or it will be viewed as a political tactic and undermine any future
credible investigation and legitimacy of January 6 investigations.

— Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

Headline from Politics Insider this morning:

    Feds likely obtained ‘pulverizing’ amount of evidence ahead of
searching Trump's Mar-a-Lago home, legal experts say.

Pulverizing! Hold that thought.

We’ve reached the stage of American history where everything we see on
the news must first be understood as political theater. In other
words, the messaging layer of news now almost always dominates the
factual narrative, with the latter often reported so unreliably as to
be meaningless anyway. Yesterday’s sensational tale of the FBI raiding
the Mar-a-Lago home of former president Donald Trump is no different.

As of now, it’s impossible to say if Trump’s alleged offense was
great, small, or in between. But this for sure is a huge story, and
its hugeness extends in multiple directions, including the
extraordinary political risk inherent in the decision to execute the
raid. If it backfires, if underlying this action there isn’t a very
substantial there there, the Biden administration just took the
world’s most reputable police force and turned it into the American
version of the Tonton Macoute on national television. We may be
looking at simultaneously the dumbest and most inadvertently
destructive political gambit in the recent history of this country.

The top story today in the New York Times, bylined by its top White
House reporter, speculates this is about “delayed returning” of “15
boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives.”
If that’s true, and it’s not tied to January 6th or some other far
more serious offense, then the Justice Department just committed
institutional suicide and moved the country many steps closer to once
far-out eventualities like national revolt or martial law. This is
true no matter what you think of Trump. Despite the early reports of
“cheers” in the West Wing, the mood in center-left media has already
drifted markedly from the overnight celebration. The Times story today
added a line missing from most early reports: “The search, however,
does not mean prosecutors have determined that Mr. Trump committed a
crime.” There are whispers throughout the business that editors are
striking down certain jubilant language, and we can even see this
playing out on cable, where the most craven of the networks’ on-air
ex-spooks are crab-crawling backward from last night’s buzz-words:

    MSNBC'S Frank Figliuzzi says 'FBI agents do not like the term
"raid"'. Moments later, MSNBC updates their lower third to "executes
search warrant" pic.twitter.com/KHCXTzJf6p
    — Kayvon Afshari (@KayvonAfshari) August 9, 2022

The hugeness of the story has become part of its explanation. An
action so extreme, we’re told by expert after expert, could only be
based upon “pulverizing” evidence.

Throughout the Trump years we’ve seen a numbing pattern of rhetorical
slippage in coverage of investigations. The aforementioned Politics
Insider story is no different. “Likely” evidence in the headline
becomes more profound in the text. An amazing five bylined writers
explain:

    Regardless of the raid’s focus legal experts quickly reached a
consensus about it: A pile of evidence must have backed up the warrant
authorizing the search.

They then quoted a “former top official in the Justice Department’s
National Security Division” — you’ll quickly lose track if you try to
count the named and unnamed intel spooks appearing in coverage today —
who said, “There’s every reason to think that there’s a plus factor in
the quantum and quantity of evidence that the government already had
to support probable cause in this case.”

Politico insisted such an action must have required a magistrate’s
assent “based upon evidence of a potential crime.” CNN wrote how
authorities necessarily “had probable grounds to believe a crime had
been committed,” while the New York Times formulation was that “the
F.B.I. would have needed to convince a judge that it had probable
cause that a crime had been committed.” Social media was full of
credentialed observers explaining what must be true. “The affidavit in
support of the MAL search warrant must be something else,” said
Harvard-trained former Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Signorelli, one
among a heap of hyperventilating names:

It’s amazing how short our cultural memory has become. Apparently few
remember all the other times this exact rhetoric was deployed in the
interminable list of other Trump investigations, only to backfire
later. Does anyone remember this doozy?

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