John Solomon: The White House Claimed It Had No Prior Knowledge of the Raid on Donald Trump's House.
The White House, Once Again, Lied.

They're just worried about democracy and norms and truth.

Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump's estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president's claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump's Florida home.

By May, Su conveyed to the Archives that President Joe Biden would not object to waiving his predecessor's claims to executive privilege, a decision that opened the door for DOJ to get a grand jury to issue a subpoena compelling Trump to turn over any remaining materials he possessed from his presidency.

The machinations are summarized in several memos and emails exchanged between the various agencies in spring 2022, months before the FBI took the added unprecedented step of raiding Trump's Florida compound with a court-issued search warrant.

The most complete summary was contained in a lengthy letter dated May 10 that acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall sent Trump's lawyers summarizing the White House's involvement.

"On April 11, 2022, the White House Counsel's Office -- affirming a request from the Department of Justice supported by an FBI letterhead memorandum -- formally transmitted a request that NARA provide the FBI access to the 15 boxes for its review within seven days, with the possibility that the FBI might request copies of specific documents following its review of the boxes," Wall wrote Trump defense attorney Evan Corcoran.

That letter revealed Biden empowered the National Archives and Records Administration to waive any claims to executive privilege that Trump might assert to block DOJ from gaining access to the documents.

...

The memos provide the most definitive evidence to date of the current White House's effort to facilitate a criminal probe of the man Joe Biden beat in the 2020 election and may face again as a challenger in 2024. That involvement included eliminating one of the legal defenses Trump might use to fight the FBI over access to his documents.

Read the whole thing. Solomon also discusses the absurdity of a later hostile president "waiving" a previous president's executive privilege, which effectively destroys executive privilege -- does Joe Biden believe he'll have executive privilege later?

I mean, yes, he'll be dead, but his staffers won't have it either.

Of course, what they're counting on is that the courts rule that all of this was illegal, thereby protecting executive privilege in the future while permitting it to be suspended for Trump only.

In the WSJ, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey argue persuasively that the Presidential Records Act give Trump the right to access his own papers, thereby nullifying the crap bullshit the FBI got their warrant on.

He has a specific right to his papers which trumps any more general law about papers.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize "all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. [section] 793, 2071, or 1519" (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included "any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021"--i.e., during Mr. Trump's term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Bold is my emphasis.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump's documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that "where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment." The former president's rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

The PRA dramatically changed the rules regarding ownership and treatment of presidential documents. Presidents from George Washington through Jimmy Carter treated their White House papers as their personal property, and neither Congress nor the courts disputed that....

The PRA lays out detailed requirements for how the archivist is to administer the records, handle privilege claims, make the records public, and impose restrictions on access. Notably, it doesn't address the process by which a former president's records are physically to be turned over to the archivist, or set any deadline, leaving this matter to be negotiated between the archivist and the former president.

The PRA explicitly guarantees a former president continuing access to his papers. Those papers must ultimately be made public, but in the meantime--unlike with all other government documents, which are available 24/7 to currently serving executive-branch officials--the PRA establishes restrictions on access to a former president's records, including a five-year restriction on access applicable to everyone (including the sitting president, absent a showing of need), which can be extended until the records have been properly reviewed and processed. Before leaving office, a president can restrict access to certain materials for up to 12 years.

In other words, the papers must eventually be made public, presumably in an archives or presidential library, but the president may keep them private for five years or even up to 12 years, under some circumstances.

What business did the deranged leftwing Archivist have insisting that Trump's papers must be made immediately available for public inspection?

The only exceptions are for National Archives personnel working on the materials, judicial process, the incumbent president and Congress (in cases of established need) and the former president himself....

Nothing in the PRA suggests that the former president's physical custody of his records can be considered unlawful under the statutes on which the Mar-a-Lago warrant is based.

...

Nothing is said about the former president himself, but applying these general criminal statutes to him based on his mere possession of records would vitiate the entire carefully balanced PRA statutory scheme. Thus if the Justice Department's sole complaint is that Mr. Trump had in his possession presidential records he took with him from the White House, he should be in the clear, even if some of those records are classified.

And there's a big question whether they were classified: Trump says he signed an executive order declassifying any paper he took with him to read. The Biden Administration and the insubordinate Deep State keeps playing a game of "I veto that!," but we only have one president at a time, and if Trump did that, then they're declassified. No matter what Deep State thinks about it, or what Biden thinks about it subsequently.

Via Debra Heine, here's the deranged leftwing Archivist:

She says that there's only one page of photos of him in the Getty Archives, 57 in total, but that seven of these photos are with Pelosi.

So he's a fan!

Mollie Hemwingway recommends this article about "Vindman 2.0" by Margot Cleveland.

Mollie
@MZHemingway

I can not recommend enough that people read about this Vindman 2.0 character out of National Archives

I've excerpted a part of that before, but the whole thing is worth a read. This partisan bureaucrat just kept pitching the DOJ on the need to investigate Trump for having papers -- "What the hell's in those boxes?!" he admits to exclaiming -- and the partisan DOJ only needed a pretext.

posted by Ace at 03:48 PM

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