FBI Officials Questioned the Need for the Mar-a-Lago Raid, and the Political Biases of the DOJ Prosecutor So "Aggressively" Pursuing This Nothing of a "Case"

I thought maybe I could say this might be political tea leaves -- the Deep State is coming to grips with the possibility that it might not be able to rig this one, so people are starting to pipe up to say "I was against all this."

Maybe they're starting to think about who will be in charge of the DOJ and FBI in January, and who won't be, and who will no longer have the power to protect them.

But I think that might be a stretch.

This is from NBC, so of course it's slanted to present the people questioning the Democrat Party donations of the DOJ lawyer pushing this as the unreasonable, politicized people.

It's interesting, though.

On Aug. 1, 2022, senior Justice Department and FBI officials gathered on the seventh floor of the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a historic meeting....

Their goal was to have what one participant later called a "come to Jesus" meeting....

For months, prosecutors from the DOJ's national security division and the leaders of the FBI's Washington field office had disagreed over an ongoing criminal probe. Tension and debate between prosecutors and agents during an investigation are routine, and often welcomed.

But this case had taken on an extraordinary level of intensity, pressure, and acrimony due to the potential defendant: former President Donald Trump.

Career officials from the FBI Washington field office eventually took an unusual step. They privately questioned a career DOJ prosecutor's political donations to Democrats and what they saw as his aggressive stance toward Trump.

In both the FBI and DOJ, career officials, unlike political appointees, are expected to act in a strictly non-partisan manner. But the hyperpatisanship of contemporary American politics had seeped into the Mar-a-Lago investigation and threatened to slow it.

The stakes were high for all of those in the room -- potentially career-ending -- and for the country. The DOJ and FBI officials were deadlocked over how to retrieve what were believed to be dozens of top-secret documents that Trump had taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and declined to return.

The DOJ and FBI officials shared the same feeling about the case: dread. After the National Archives repeatedly requested that Trump return the documents, some officials assumed Trump would simply hand over the materials. When he didn't, all of them saw no good options.

"You know what the reaction was in the department?" recalled a former FBI official involved in the case who asked not to be named. "We were like, 'Oh shit, we don't want any part of this. The real enemies are Russia and China.'"

Steven D'Antuono, then the head of the bureau's Washington field office and who has since retired, feared that the documents dispute would further erode public faith in the FBI.

"I was worried about it increasing distrust in us," D'Antuono told NBC News in his first on-the-record media interview about the Mar-a-Lago dispute, which was first reported by The Washington Post.

Inside the FBI, bipartisan criticism of its Hillary Clinton email investigation, Trump's firing of James Comey, and special counsel John Durham's probe of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation had taken a toll.

"We all thought this posed a risk to us both professionally and personally," the former senior FBI official said. "I can't impress upon you the pressure."

He added, "We're trying to make the best decisions we can with all the emotions swirling."

The intense pressure also fueled distrust. Several FBI agents in the Washington field office were concerned about the aggressive tactics and political donations of Jay Bratt, one of the Justice Department prosecutors.

According to public records, Bratt, who now works for special counsel Jack Smith, had donated $600 to a former DOJ colleague's unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign for the U.S. Senate in Oregon in 2007, $150 to the Oregon Senate Democratic Campaign Committee that same year, and a total of $500 to the Democratic National Committee in 1993 and 1994.

Bratt, through the Justice Department press office, declined an interview request. DOJ officials flatly dismissed any claim that Bratt was biased against the former president.

They said that Bratt pursued all cases aggressively, noting that he had a long history of investigating the handling of classified documents by Democrats, including Hillary Clinton.

Oh sure, and we all remember the raid on Hillary Clinton's offices to recover the server full of classified information.

Oh wait, no we don't -- Hillary Clinton was allowed to destroy that evidence -- through the BleachBit data-erasure program -- and turn over instead a highly-sanitized version of her server. Which still had may classified documents on it.

And we all remember how Jay Bratt then prosecuted her for defying a subpoena and destroying evidence under subpeona, right?

In the Trump case, they added, Bratt had tried for months to seek a resolution with the former president that would not involve a search of Mar-a-Lago.

And Hillary Clinton refused to turn over her server, and you were fine with that. No raid. No warrant. No prosecution for obstruction of justice.

A senior DOJ official with knowledge of Bratt's work said in an interview that he had never seen him show political bias. "It would be hard for me to overstate how much I disagree with that characterization," said the official, who asked not to be named. "He is one of the finest career prosecutors I've worked with. I've never seen a hint of bias."

Said Merrick Garland. (I'll bet.)

D'Antuono, though, was concerned about the approach of the DOJ team investigating Trump, which Bratt led. "Jay was being a little overly aggressive," D'Antuono recalled. "The aggressiveness that was there, from day one."

...

In a less divisive era in American politics, personal political donations might have drawn less attention. It was generally accepted that career DOJ and FBI officials could put their personal politics aside and investigate any elected official, Republican or Democrat, in a fair and fact-based manner.

But 50 years after Watergate, American politics, culture, and news coverage had changed. Partisanship had steadily risen and been rewarded in Washington. Some politicians had grown tired of the independence of the DOJ and suspicious of career public servants. And the internet had created a powerful new way for politicians to circumvent the press and express their own unfiltered views directly to the public.

Trump had deftly taken advantage of all of these dynamics and been elected to the country's highest office. In the Trump era, bias was assumed, encouraged, and expected by many. Nonpartisan public service was increasingly dismissed as naive. And now, division and distrust threatened to delay the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

That populist cynic Trump destroyed confidence in our incorruptible institutions, not the incorruptible institutions becoming corrupt!

...

Hyperpartisanship, conspiracy theories, and distrust

The disagreement between the DOJ and FBI officials over Mar-a-Lago was a microcosm of the hyperpartisanship and conspiracy theories undermining public trust in government institutions. It also fueled divisions between and within the organizations.

When Matthew Olsen, the head of the DOJ's National Security Division, which investigates leaks of classified information, arrived at the Aug. 2 meeting at the FBI he brought a draft search warrant with him.

...

D'Antuono and other FBI agents were determined to recover the classified documents, but not in a way that they saw as needlessly provocative. D'Antuono worried that an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago would bolster years of exaggerated claims from Trump that the bureau was politically persecuting him.

You did investigate him for three years based on nothing but a fraudulent campaign oppo document commissioned, paid for, and promoted by Hillary Clinton.

Does that not count?

At the outset of the meeting at the FBI, Bratt argued that Trump's defiance was clear. After months of requests from the National Archives, the former president had returned 15 boxes of material that included 197 documents with classification markings in January 2022, a year after leaving office. Other documents from his time in the White House, though, appeared to be missing.

In other words, he was cooperating -- and far more than the conspicuously-unprosecuted Hillary Clinton was.
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Update to the last post: Looks like Biden's corrupt DOJ is now attempting to prosecute a company that has Tim Pool and Benny Johnson on its roster.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:20 PM

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