Did the DOJ and FBI Lie To Get Another Warrant, This One to Recover Documents Exposing Their Crimes In Getting the Previous Fraudulent Russiagate Warrants?

Neo-Neocon shared this theory, written up by her commenter TJ Olsen, but offered by Robert Barnes on Viva Frei's podcast.

Federal defense attorney and aggressive Con Law advocate, Robert Barnes, has an unexpected take on the Deep State's further engagement with ex-Prez Trump.

He believes that it wasn't egregious overreaching. Instead, he argues that indications support his argument that Trump asked heads of Departments what documents they absolutely would not want to see declassified? (This has been mooted elsewhere.)

And then declassified them and secreted them away as insurance over the Deep State.

Thus, Barnes argues that the MAL raid was an aggressive attempt by the Deep State to regain possession of said documents from Trump and keep their wrongful heinous deeds hidden or simply destroyed outright.

The huge size and strategy of going in -- hoping to be secretive and hoping that if discovered, it would redound against Trump, smacks of audacious desperation! In other words, incredibly risky.

Further, he thinks that an overly broad warrant is consistent with his theory.

He adds many details. I have to listen again to his development of his points, from around 20 to 60 minutes mark, in this recent interview hosted by Viva Frei.

While I think there's a good chance that theory is overall right, the right absolutely must not follow the left in The Walls Are Closing In/The Train Is Running Out of Track claims.

I do not for one second believe there are a handful of documents that establish, conclusively, the case that the Deep State committed a coup -- for crying out loud, why would the Deep State coupists write that down? That's not how it works.

As you may have heard, Holocaust deniers/Hitler apologists are fond of pointing out that Hitler did not sign any order to undertake the final solution. Yes, he was careful about that and gave his orders verbally to Heydrich and others to relay his orders to the rest of the Nazi High Command.

I'm pretty sure our coupists have learned a thing or two from Hitler.

Another reason to doubt there's a smoking gun memo: Trump would have already have released that. He wouldn't just be holding on to it for future leverage.

Still, while one must not fall into the trap of imagining that These Documents Mean The Much-Prophesized Storm Is Finally Here, one can imagine they contain information the plotters would find embarrassing and would prefer to not have to answer about at all.

And in fact a Newsweek article claim that Trump was in fact "hoarding" documents about Russiagate, and that the main point of this raid was to collect up these damaging documents and hide them once more.

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last Monday was specifically intended to recover Donald Trump's personal "stash" of hidden documents, two high-level U.S. intelligence officials tell Newsweek.

To justify the unprecedented raid on a former president's residence and protect the source who revealed the existence of Trump's private hoard, agents went into Trump's residence on the pretext that they were seeking all government documents, says one official who has been involved in the investigation. But the true target was this private stash, which Justice Department officials feared Donald Trump might weaponize.

"They collected everything that rightfully belonged to the U.S. government but the true target was these documents that Trump had been collecting since early in his administration," says the source, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

The source says that the negotiations to return the documents the National Archives claimed must be returned were cordial -- until the DOJ and FBI were tipped that Trump had Russiagate documents.

And then they decided they had to raid Mar-a-Lago to get those documents, using the pretext of recovering the fairly mundane National Archives documents as cover.

But in the course of its investigation, the FBI and Justice became aware of Trump's private collection. As Newsweek previously reported, a confidential human source revealed that the former president wasn't planning to divulge that he had possession of some of his own documents and that he did not intend to return them.

...

The two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the situation tell Newsweek that while some of the intelligence documents might have dealt with nuclear weapons, that was not the main focus. "Donald Trump kept documents that interested him," one of those officials says, "sometimes Iranian or North Korean nukes, sometimes Ukraine or Russia, some foreign leaders." It wasn't the subject matter per se that was of interest to Justice as it was fear that Trump might "weaponize" the information, including for personal gain, the official says.

Like, for example, exposing the misdeeds of the Russiagate coupists?

"Trump was particularly interested in matters related to the Russia hoax and the wrong-doings of the deep state," one former Trump official tells Newsweek. "I think he felt, and I agree, that these are facts that the American people need to know." The official says Trump may have been planning to use them as part of a 2024 run for the presidency.

The high-level U.S. government officials explain that it was not necessarily the classification level of the documents nor even their subject matter that investigators were focused on.

"All official documents, regardless of classification, are required to be returned to the Archives under the Presidential Records Act," one of the officials says. "And surely the FBI was going about its business of retrieving everything."

The source say that it is helpful to think about their being two different sets of documents: the National Archives documents mentioned in the warrant, which the FBI is not really interested in, but which they claimed "exposed sources and methods" in order to justify the extremely broad search warrant, and the actual Russiagate documents, which were their true quarry, but which they did not want to admit.

And which they might have very dubious legal pretext to seize, because Trump actually declassified them. Though, as John Solomon reported, the DOJ then slow-rolled the declassification order and informed Trump hours before he left office they needed more time to go through redactions -- thus claiming that the declassification had not gone through. Bullshit; the president's order was legally effective as soon as he gave it. A partisan leftwing bureaucrat has no right or power to veto him.

Two other morsels to chew on, which may be congruent, or incongruent, with the above reportage.

First: Paul Sperry, who Twitter banned without cause or explanation, reports that Hillary Clinton has been lobbying the DOJ hard to raid Trump's home and seize his documents for months now.

Some of my friends caution to take Sperry with a grain of salt, as his sources are wrong as often as they are right.

Posobiec does not say if he is reporting the following or just speculating it:

Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec

The DOJ affidavit is based on that NY Times article Maggie H wrote a while back, mixed in with hearsay and innuendo. That's why they won't release it

Screenshot this

He links this New York Times article, telling the story of the bitter liberal retiring National Archives director who saw Trump leaving the White House with boxes and decided that this needed to be investigated.

In a statement, David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, did not criticize Mr. Trump or directly accuse him of violating the Presidential Records Act. But Mr. Ferriero strongly defended the National Archives' mission and the need for presidents to follow federal record keeping laws.

"The Presidential Records Act is critical to our democracy, in which the government is held accountable by the people," Mr. Ferriero said. "Whether through the creation of adequate and proper documentation, sound records management practices, the preservation of records or the timely transfer of them to the National Archives at the end of an administration, there should be no question as to need for both diligence and vigilance. Records matter."

Tucker Carlson offered more texture to this story. He says this bitter liberal bureaucrat saw Trump leaving with the boxes on TV, and huffily exclaimed, "What's in those boxes?!," as if a man leaving an office he'd worked in for four years would not be expected to leave with boxes. And lobbied the DOJ to open up a file on it, ostensibly to make sure Trump didn't take any of his precious National Archives material.

Meanwhile he gave Obama millions of documents to keep in his unbuilt "library."

I've seen various speculations that the real reason the DOJ refuses to show the affidavit supporting their bullshit warrant is that it is based on media reports like this one -- which is the same M.O. by which they obtained their Russiagate warrants, citing media reports for which they themselves were the unacknowledged sources.

Will Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Eyepatch John McCain demand to know whether Hillary Clinton or her lawyers or allies has been in contact with the DOJ about this, pushing another Russiagate on to the DOJ and FBI, which the DOJ and FBI promptly decided to take up?

Or will they just go along with it?

Spoiler: The latter.

Both of the below are worth watching, if you have the time.

posted by Ace at 03:24 PM

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