DOJ Argues That Its Warrant Cannot Be Unsealed Because Its Contents Are Too Sensitive While It Continues Leaking the Supposed Contents of This Warrant to All of Its Media Pals

Note: The magistrate (not a judge) has ordered that the affidavit must be partially made public. I'm sure the parts that will be made public will be the parts the DOJ and FBI want made public, the parts they've already leaked. Nothing supporting the claims they've made in their leaks.

I guess I'll cover the affidavit later when it's revealed.

Update:

Judge Reinhart says "I am not prepared to find that the affidavit should be fully sealed" and asks the government for proposed redactions to the Mar-a-Lago affidavit by next week, adding this will be a careful process.

So the government gets to pick-and-choose what is redacted and what isn't, which is the worst of all possible worlds.

Trump should file an emergency interlocutory appeal. He moved to have the whole affidavit made public, not just the parts that Merrick Garland already leaked to the press and now wants to give an official sheen to.

...

The DOJ is just a Perjury Factory.

Jonathan Turley has a lot of problems with the DOJ and its warrant.

One point he makes: Merrick Garland is arguing in front of Jeffrey Epstein's Magistrate today that the details of the affidavit supporting the warrant are too sensitive to be unsealed. Trump has called for the affidavit to be made public.

And yet, at the same time, Merrick Garland's DOJ officials and FBI agents -- and possibly Merrick Garland himself -- can't stop leaking unsubstantiated claims from the affidavit to the their friends in the leftwing propaganda media.

Apparently the affidavit is only a top national security secret when people want to view it with a critical eye. When his leftwing media allies agree to transmit his claims without any skepticism, his leaks do not endanger national security.

Sean Davis @seanmdav

The government leaked information about the FBI raid to reporters that it is now using in court as evidence of why the government shouldn’t have to release information about the FBI raid to reporters.

Eat your heart out, Kafka.

Apparently, the FBI and DOJ are citing their own leaks to the press in their motion to deny making the affidavit supporting the warrant public. This affidavit is too sensitive to be released. Just look at what we've leaked to the press so far, and that's just a taste, your honor!

Turley makes additional points in his column.

The Justice Department also reportedly refused to allow a special master to review the seized material after alleged attorney-client material was taken -- a move that would have addressed concerns that the search was "pretextual" to seize January 6th evidence.

I saw a bit of Harmeet K. Dillon's appearance on Tucker Carlson's long-form interview show on Fox Nation. She says that the people checking these documents for "taint"... are all the FBI and DOJ officials who are too "hot," too obviously partisan, to be officially assigned to the case.

So they're on the taint team, because their names won't be exposed.

Just bitter anti-Trump partisans pouring through his privileged communications with his attorneys, that's all.

I've been banging the drum on this:

When Garland has faced clear demands for independent action, he has folded. For example, Garland has refused to appoint a special counsel in the investigation of Hunter Biden. But there is no way to investigate Hunter Biden without running over continual references to President Biden.

By refusing a special counsel, Garland has removed the president's greatest threat. Unlike the U.S. Attorney investigating Hunter Biden, a special counsel would be expected to publish a report that would detail the scope of the Biden family's alleged influence peddling and foreign contacts.

Likewise, the Justice Department is conducting a grand jury investigation that is aggressively pursuing Trump associates and Republican figures, including seizing the telephones of members of Congress. That investigation has bearing on the integrity and the status of Biden's potential opponent in 2024.

The investigation also has triggered concerns over the party in power investigating the opposing political party. It is breathtaking that Garland would see no need for an independent or special counsel given this country's continued deep divisions and mistrust.

Democrats often compare the January 6 investigation to Watergate but fail to note that the Watergate investigation was led by an independent counsel precisely because of these inherent political conflicts.

NeverTrump demanded a special counsel to look into anything having to do with Trump.

But they've absolutely refused to call for a special counsel to look into Hunter Biden -- or, for that matter, to look into Trump or January 6th. You don't want a prosecution of a political enemy being conducted by an invested partisan prosecutor, either.

But NeverTrump -- which can't go ten minutes without pronouncing upon their Moral Perfection and complete Incorruptibility as far as partisan and tribal impulses -- not only refuses to call for a special counsel in an analogous case that cuts against their partisan and tribal interest, but refuses to even explain why they are treating the two cases differently.

They simply refuse to address the matter at all!

They've really learned quite a bit from their leftwing media allies, haven't they?

Margot Cleveland had a great piece earlier this week, exposing the rotten beginnings of this latest partisan witch-hunt. Just as the first impeachment was started by a highly partisan ex-Biden aide named Eric Ciaramella who falsely claimed to be a "whistleblower," this one was started by a bitterly partisan pencil-neck bureaucrat who got mad because Trump left the White House with boxes, and he literally exclaimed, "What the hell's in those boxes?!," as if this bitch had any right to demand that.

But he kept demanding the DOJ open an investigation, which of course they did.

Note that he took a much less aggressive posture when it came to enforcing the law as regards Hillary Clinton's emails, which were also supposed to be in the National Archives, not because of the Presidential Records Act (she'll never be President, ha-ha), but because of the closely-analogous Federal Records Act.

Cleveland seems to believe it's this National Archives pencil-neck who leaked to Newsweek about the = target of the FBI's raid being, supposedly, classified documents.

NARA handled its discovery of Hillary Clinton's violation of the equivalent "Federal Records Act" vastly differently. In September of 2015, in response to questions from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, about the former secretary of state's use of a non-governmental email account, Ferriero informed Grassley of NARA's normal response to allegations of "unauthorized destruction or removal of federal records." "NARA will write a letter to the agency asking it to report back to NARA within 30 days and open a case file on the matter." At that point, NARA and the agency would work together to recover any missing documents or to reconstruct them if needed.

NARA then explained that upon learning of Clinton's use of a non-governmental email account in March 2015, it "immediately acted In accordance with our regulations by sending a letter to the State Department, setting off the process described above." Significantly, while noting that the use of the non-government email may result in a separate DOJ investigation, in the case of Clinton, "NARA has not Initiated an 'Investigation' of Secretary Clinton's email practices; rather, as noted above, we have been communicating with the State Department on this matter, and are deferring to the State Department's review (and any other agencies conducting Investigations)."

In contrast, in the case of Trump, NARA referred the matter of documents stamped "classified" to the DOJ, which promptly opened an investigation into Trump and used a grand jury to subpoena Trump and others.

Numerous public statements by Ferriero, who at the time of the referral to the DOJ served as the country's archivist, suggest a partisan goal underlying the referral. First was Ferriero's bizarre overreaction to "watching the Trumps leaving the White House and getting off in the helicopter" while someone was "carrying a white banker box." "What the hell's in that box?," Ferriero claimed he asked himself.

Then there was Ferriero's admission that he decided to retire at the end of April 2022 "because he is worried about the political future." "It's important to me, that this administration replace me," Ferriero said, adding, "I'm concerned about what's going to happen in 2024. I don't want it left to ... the unknowns of the presidential election."

That's quite a strange statement for an archivist to make, suggesting as it does that politics matter in the performance of his role.

It's all a great read. I've only excerpted one part of it.

Another incorruptible institution we should all believe in.

posted by Ace at 02:56 PM

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