Aug
21
No Crime at Mar-a-Lago
“The legal justification doesn’t pass constitutional muster. There seems to be no crime committed, only that the National Archives grew impatient over record retrieval.” — Matt Vespa, Townhall.com
Shortly after the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month, I started collecting and reading relevant articles, so I could, of course, keep track of developments and eventually blog about it. But, there were several articles per day, and I soon found that I wasn’t interested enough to keep up with the minutiae. I can tell you, though, that early on it became obvious that a few things were a bit hinky — yes, that’s a legit word — regarding the raid itself, the clearly biased judge who issued the warrant, the supposed justification behind it, etc.
Townhall’s Matt Vespa wrote a recent column on the Mar-a-Lago raid in which he quoted from a Newsweek article by Mike Davis. Who? Davis is an attorney who once clerked for Justice Gorsuch and is former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. Here are a few choice quotes from Davis’s piece:
“The purported purpose of the highly controversial home raid with a brigade of 30 FBI agents — a raid Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted he personally ordered after his aides initially denied it — is related to 15 to 25 boxes of presidential records, some of which bureaucrats at the National Archives claim are classified and which Trump took to Mar-a-Lago when he left the White House over 18 months ago.”
“Even if Trump took classified records, that isn’t a crime. The president has the inherent constitutional power to declassify any record he wants, in any manner he wants, regardless of any otherwise-pertinent statute or regulation that applies to everyone else. The president does not need to obtain Congress’ or a bureaucrat’s permission — or jump through their regulatory or statutory hoops — to declassify anything.”
“It is pretextual legal nonsense for the Biden Justice Department to pretend Trump broke any criminal statute. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Attorney General Garland apparently did not seek an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) — the de facto general counsel for the executive branch — before ordering this home raid of his boss’s chief political enemy. Perhaps Garland knew OLC wouldn’t give him the answer he wanted.”
“At best, then, this amounts to a dispute over the Presidential Records Act. If the boxes sought by DOJ contain presidential records, then the National Archives “owns” them — but they’ll almost certainly stay with Trump in his eventual presidential library [with its secure facilities (SCIFs) for the maintenance of classified records].”
“We cannot allow our law enforcement agencies to become third-world political hit squads.”
Davis also points out that the Clintons are guilty of actual crimes, yet no FBI raids were conducted against them. Here’s a reminder by constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley on Fox News regarding a member of the Clinton Administration:
“You had the Sandy Berger case where you had the former National Security Advisor who removed material in his socks – it was clearly intentional – he dropped it at a spot where he could recover it later. And Berger didn’t serve any jail. He didn’t even have his clearance permanently removed. He was allowed to plea to a misdemeanor.”
In summary, the main thrusts of Davis’s article were: 1) Trump did nothing wrong, as all documents in question were declassified, and he was already cooperating with the National Archives; 2) the DoJ had other, less drastic options, as well as more concerning events to spend its time and resources on (e.g., harassment and threats directed at Supreme Court Justices); 3) there has been “unprecedented and destructive politicization of the Justice Department”, and Attorney General Garland and FBI Director Wray should be impeached (preferably once Republicans regain the majority of the House).
I totally agree.
