So, Attorney General Garland gave the world 3 minutes and 30 seconds of his precious time … and … said … nothing.
Remember the Wendy’s ad with the tagline, “Where’s the Beef?” Mr. Garland gave us no beef. I’m going to speculate that tens of millions of Americans will have a big beef over Mr. Garland giving us no beef.
He said the Justice Department has “has filed a motion in the southern district of Florida to unseal a search warrant and property receipt relating to a court approved search that the FBI conducted earlier this week.” If that sounds important, I hate to break it to you: It is not.
What we really need is the application for the warrant. That would show at some length the probable cause for evidence of a federal crime. Former prosecutors tell me that application will never see the light of day. Unfortunately, that’s where the real beef is.
Was this outrageous raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago really just a function of some missing documents sought by the National Archive? Or was it a fishing expedition, looking for any documents that might link the former president to some kind of conspiracy regarding the January 6 Capitol riot?
Was this outrageous FBI invasion a futile attempt to persuade the American public of all the things the January 6 kangaroo-court committee has failed to persuade the public? Even with its many televised hearings, polls show the committee failed to move the needle against Mr. Trump. Was a politicized justice department and FBI desperately trying to somehow prove what the kangaroo court failed to prove?
Mr. Garland blathered on about the equal application of justice, but no former president in our history has ever been subjected to a raid from law enforcement. Neither were Hillary Clinton or James Comey. They aren’t former presidents, but they were up to their eyeballs in destroying or leaking or bleaching or clouding classified documents.
Mr. Trump outranks them by a wide margin in the government pecking order, but his home was attacked. Would the sealed official application reveal anything there?
This sealed application, which would presumably include probable cause for a federal crime, might explain why there was never any imminent risk of documents or other evidence being destroyed or concealed from the FBI.
Mr. Trump cooperated — fully. He said, “Look, whatever you need, let us know,” according to two eyewitnesses. The federal team asked to see a storage locker and the president complied. The meeting was cordial.
The feds asked for a bigger lock on the storage and the Secret Service complied. They wanted surveillance footage and Mr. Trump complied. Earlier, the former president returned 15 boxes of documents, many of them classified, at the request of the National Archives.
After mid-June, there was no other contact between Mr. Trump’s team and the government lawyers, until the invasion of August 8. Why did this raid happen? What were the feds thinking?
Mr. Garland says he personally approved the decision. For what exact reason? White House officials, meanwhile, claim they didn’t know about it. I don’t believe them.
It's kind of like their claim that we now have zero inflation. I don’t believe that either. The White House along with Senators Schumer and Manchin claim the IRS is just going after millionaire tax cheats. I don’t believe that either. In fact, it looks like the 87,000 new IRS agents could be mercenaries armed to the teeth for deadly force aimed at Uber drivers, gig workers, waitresses, small businesses, and ordinary working people.
Larry Kudlow was the Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump 2018-2021. His Fox Business show "Kudlow" airs at 4 p.m &. radio show airs on 770 ABC from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
