Affidavit does not support media narrative about Trump documents

 Red States:

Trump Affidavit Points to Absolutely Insane ‘Justification’ for the FBI Raid

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 So what’s in the affidavit? While the redactions cover most of that up, there is enough revealed that exposes just how blatantly political the FBI’s move was. For example, the pursuit partially originated not from any hard evidence of criminal activity, but from a CBS News article.

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Who could have guessed that there would be moving trucks at Mar-a-Lago while Trump was in the middle of moving from the White House to Mar-a-Lago? Just incredible stuff, but it was apparently enough for the National Archives and the FBI to join forces to break all precedent to target a former president.

The other part of this centers on documents already returned to the NARA. Yes, you heard that right, part of the basis for the search warrant was that Trump had already returned boxes that had been requested. The NARA then identified some of the returned documents as still having classified markings and used it as a pretense to go after whatever else might be at Mar-a-Lago.

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The boxes being referred to by Maggie Haberman were returned in January of 2022 after the typical negotiation that goes on between former presidents and the National Archives. Also of note is that Haberman is very careful to use the phrase “unchanged classified markings” instead of “classified documents.” That’s a nod to the fact that they were declassified before being copied and taken.

That notion is furthered by the fact that the affidavit makes clear the classification of the documents is not what is at issue under the Espionage Act. This was an incredibly broad fishing expedition based on no legitimate probable cause.

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What’s this come down to? If you believe the affidavit’s justification, it’s not really about the possession of classified materials, and there’s no real indication that there will be criminal charges coming. Instead, it appears the grand disagreement was over what constituted a “secure” location at Mar-a-Lago. Yes, they raided a former president’s home because they felt a double-locked storage room protected by Secret Service wasn’t enough, even as Trump had tried to accommodate their concerns.

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I got the impression that the folks at NARA and the FBI are acting like jerks because of animus toward Trump.  If that is the case it will likely come out during discovery if they try to go to trial on this matter.

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