Dave: I have to admit that I won­dered about what you meant about the Caliguliza­tion of the Unit­ed States. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, now I know.

Brad (& Dave):
First time I heard that phrase, “The Caliguliza­tion of the U.S.” was yes­ter­day, I real­ized exact­ly what was meant! Although, I have to con­fess to being prepped by Gore Vidal’s “Unit­ed States of Amne­sia”.

Btw., Have you heard the joke that goes: “Many Gov­ern­ments in at least three con­ti­nents have been ask­ing why Amer­i­ca did­n’t have insur­rec­tions on their cap­i­tal? Almost unan­i­mous­ly, they answered, ‘Because there’s no U.S. Embassy there’ ”!
(Now, chick­ens back to roost)

So were any texts sent on gov­ern­ment phones actu­al­ly kept at the end of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion? It’s one of the many ques­tions raised by the lat­est round of ‘miss­ing text’ sto­ries com­ing out of the Jan 6 inves­ti­ga­tion. The epi­dem­ic of miss­ing texts isn’t just impact­ing the phones of the 24 Secret Ser­vice agents involved with the Jan 6 inves­ti­ga­tion. Or the phones of then-act­ing DHS Sec­re­tary Chad Wolf and Deputy Sec­re­tary Ken Cuc­cinel­li. We’re now learn­ing that there are miss­ing text mes­sages for the top three fig­ures in the Pen­ta­gon too: then-Sec­re­tary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, then-act­ing Defense Sec­re­tary Christo­pher Miller, and Miller’s Chief of Staff Kash Patel.

Learn­ing that the top three offi­cials in the Pen­ta­gon have their text mes­sages miss­ing dur­ing the peri­od would already been incred­i­bly sus­pi­cions under ‘nor­mal’ cir­cum­stances. But don’t for­get that extreme­ly abnor­mal cir­cum­stances around Miller’s and Patel’s pro­mo­tions. It was sus­pi­cious­ly remark­able ascent for Patel, espe­cial­ly:

First, Trump replaces Mark Esper with coun­tert­er­ror­ism chief Chris Miller as Defense Sec­re­tary on Novem­ber 9, 2020, days after the elec­tion. But it was Trump’s deci­sion to appoint par­ti­san hack Kash Patel as Miller’s Chief of Staff and Ezra Cohen-Wat­nick as the act­ing under­sec­re­tary of defense of intel­li­gence that real­ly raised eye­brows. Then, short­ly after Trump’s par­don­ing of Michael Fly­nn on Novem­ber 20, both Fly­nn and Pow­ell con­tact­ed Cohen-Wat­nick — a long-time Fly­nn ally — implor­ing him to take extreme mea­sures involv­ing the elec­tion. Fly­nn want­ed Cohen-Wat­nick to issue orders to have the mil­i­tary seize bal­lots. But it’s the request made by Pow­ell to Cohen-Wat­nick short­ly after Flynn’s call that is so inter­est­ing here: Pow­ell want­ed Cohen-Wat­nick to order some sort of mil­i­tary spe­cial forces raid to cap­ture Gina Haspel who had alleged­ly been injured dur­ing a secret mis­sion in Ger­many to destroy the servers used to steal the elec­tion from Trump. It was two week lat­er that Trump lit­er­al­ly ordered the replace­ment of Haspel’s deputy direc­tor with Patel, only to be dis­suad­ed at the very last minute, after the order had already been giv­en. And that move to make Patel the act­ing deputy direc­tor of the CIA appears to have been part of a move that could have seen Patel replace Haspel her­self as the head of the CIA. Kash Patel has A LOT of ques­tion to answer. Ques­tions direct­ly relat­ed to what was a par­tial­ly suc­cess­ful post-elec­tion plot to sub­vert the lead­er­ship of key nation­al secu­ri­ty agen­cies.

And then there’s the incrim­i­nat­ing info Army Sec­re­tary Ryan McCarthy could have had resid­ing on his phone. Incrim­i­nat­ing info that could be direct­ly relat­ed to the var­i­ous plots being pushed by Fly­nn and Pow­ell, and which pre­sum­ably involved Patel: Recall how McCarthy was report­ed­ly sit­ting in on the ‘bonkers’ Decem­ber 18, 2020, meet­ing at the White House with Michael Fly­nn and Sid­ney Pow­ell where they encour­aged Trump to con­sid­er the Nation­al Emer­gen­cies Act and “extra­or­di­nary mea­sures” to address the elec­toral out­come. We were told that oth­ers in the meet­ing object­ed, includ­ing McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff Gen­er­al James McConville. McCarthy and McConville then quick­ly issued a state­ment say­ing, “There is no role for the U.S. mil­i­tary in deter­min­ing the out­come of an Amer­i­can elec­tion.” Also recall how that Decem­ber 18 meet­ing was fol­lowed by Trumps now-noto­ri­ous Decem­ber 19 1:42 am tweet call­ing for his sup­port­ers to attend the ‘Wild’ Jan 6 ral­ly, which appears to have been the ral­ly­ing cry to for­mu­late plans to block the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the elec­tion results on that day. So while it does­n’t sound like McCarthy was some­one who was will­ing to go along with these bonkers schemes, it does sound like he direct­ly wit­nessed the plot­ting of these bonkers schemes.

And who knows what kind of incrim­i­nat­ing texts Christo­pher Miller may have sent or received, but that fact that he was appoint­ed to that posi­tion a week after Trump lost the elec­tion and had Kash Patel work­ing as his chief of staff cer­tain­ly sug­gests Miller wit­nessed a lot at a min­i­mum. Imag­ine the kind of texts he would have sent dur­ing this peri­od. And keep imag­in­ing that, because that imag­i­na­tion is as close as we’re appar­ent­ly ever going to get to learn­ing about the con­tents of those miss­ing mes­sages. Well, unless, of course, inves­ti­ga­tors look into whether or not any hack­ers may have got­ten their dig­i­tal hands on those files. But bar­ring some sort of help­ful hack­er inter­ven­tion it looks like the invalu­able evi­dence that was stored on the phones of the top Pen­ta­gon offi­cials on that day are lost for­ev­er:

CNN

First on CNN: Jan. 6 text mes­sages wiped from phones of key Trump Pen­ta­gon offi­cials

By Tier­ney Sneed and Zachary Cohen, CNN
Updat­ed 4:42 PM ET, Tue August 2, 2022

(CNN)The Defense Depart­ment wiped the phones of top depart­ing DOD and Army offi­cials at the end of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, delet­ing any texts from key wit­ness­es to events sur­round­ing the Jan­u­ary 6, 2021, attack on the US Capi­tol, accord­ing to court fil­ings.

The acknowl­edg­ment that the phones from the Pen­ta­gon offi­cials had been wiped was first revealed in a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act law­suit Amer­i­can Over­sight brought against the Defense Depart­ment and the Army. The watch­dog group is seek­ing Jan­u­ary 6 records from for­mer act­ing Sec­re­tary of Defense Chris Miller, for­mer chief of staff Kash Patel, and for­mer Sec­re­tary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, among oth­er promi­nent Pen­ta­gon offi­cials — hav­ing filed ini­tial FOIA requests just a few days after the Capi­tol attack.

Miller, Patel and McCarthy have all been viewed as cru­cial wit­ness­es for under­stand­ing gov­ern­men­t’s response to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol assault and for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s reac­tion to the breach. All three were involved in the Defense Depart­men­t’s response to send­ing Nation­al Guard troops to the US Capi­tol as the riot was unfold­ing. There is no sug­ges­tion that the offi­cials them­selves erased the records.

The gov­ern­men­t’s asser­tion in the fil­ings that the offi­cials’ text mes­sages from that day were not pre­served is the lat­est blow to the efforts to bring trans­paren­cy to the events of Jan­u­ary 6. It comes as the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty is also under fire for the appar­ent loss of mes­sages from the Secret Ser­vice that day.

Miller declined to com­ment. Patel and McCarthy did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to requests for com­ment. The Defense Depart­ment did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to CNN’s request. The US Army Pub­lic Affairs media rela­tions chief, Col. Cathy Wilkin­son, said in a state­ment that, “It is our pol­i­cy not to com­ment on ongo­ing lit­i­ga­tion.”

Amer­i­can Over­sight is now call­ing for a “cross-agency inves­ti­ga­tion” by the Jus­tice Depart­ment to inves­ti­gate destruc­tion of the mate­ri­als.

“It’s just astound­ing to believe that the agency did not under­stand the impor­tance of pre­serv­ing its records — par­tic­u­lar­ly [with regards] to the top offi­cials that might have cap­tured: what they were doing, when they were doing it, why they were doing, it on that day,” Heather Sawyer, Amer­i­can Over­sight’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, told CNN.

Sawyer said that her orga­ni­za­tion learned the records were not pre­served from gov­ern­ment attor­neys ear­li­er this year, and that acknowl­edg­ment was then memo­ri­al­ized in a joint sta­tus report filed with the court in March.

“DOD and Army con­veyed to Plain­tiff that when an employ­ee sep­a­rates from DOD or Army he or she turns in the gov­ern­ment-issued phone, and the phone is wiped,” the gov­ern­ment said in the fil­ing. “For those cus­to­di­ans no longer with the agency, the text mes­sages were not pre­served and there­fore could not be searched, although it is pos­si­ble that par­tic­u­lar text mes­sages could have been saved into oth­er records sys­tems such as email.”

The acknowl­edg­ment that the records were not pre­served has tak­en on new sig­nif­i­cance in the wake of the ongo­ing scan­dal over the loss of Secret Ser­vice agents’ texts from Jan­u­ary 6.

“It just reveals a wide­spread lack of tak­ing seri­ous­ly the oblig­a­tion to pre­serve records, to ensure account­abil­i­ty, to ensure account­abil­i­ty to their part­ners in the leg­isla­tive branch and to the Amer­i­can peo­ple,” Sawyer said.

The Secret Ser­vice has said that its texts were lost as a result of a pre­vi­ous­ly sched­uled data migra­tion of its agents’ cell phones that began on Jan­u­ary 27, 2021, exact­ly three weeks after the attack on the US Capi­tol. Home­land Secu­ri­ty Inspec­tor Gen­er­al Joseph Cuf­fari first learned those texts were miss­ing as ear­ly as May 2021, CNN pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.

The pat­tern across mul­ti­ple agen­cies has prompt­ed her orga­ni­za­tion to write to Attor­ney Gen­er­al Mer­rick Gar­land, who is already fac­ing a request from con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats that he take over the DHS’ probe into the miss­ing Secret Ser­vice texts.

“Amer­i­can Over­sight accord­ing­ly urges you to inves­ti­gate DOD’s actions in allow­ing the destruc­tion of records poten­tial­ly rel­e­vant to this sig­nif­i­cant mat­ter of nation­al atten­tion and his­tor­i­cal impor­tance,” the let­ter said, while cit­ing calls from Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen. Dick Durbin that the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty be inves­ti­gat­ed for sim­i­lar fail­ures, the let­ter, shared with CNN on Tues­day, said.

After fil­ing the FOIA requests with the Defense Depart­ment and the Army, Amer­i­can Over­sight says the Pen­ta­gon acknowl­edged the request on Jan­u­ary 15, 2021. Amer­i­can Over­sight then filed a law­suit that March to force dis­clo­sure of the records. In addi­tion to the FOIA oblig­a­tions Amer­i­can Over­sight says the Pen­ta­gon has ignored in fail­ing to pre­serve the records, Sawyer also point­ed to a sep­a­rate fed­er­al records law also require that the gov­ern­ment pre­serve records that have “infor­ma­tion­al val­ue of the data in them.”

“I think it’s high­ly unlike­ly that any­one could argue with a straight face that com­mu­ni­ca­tions hap­pen­ing between these top offi­cials on Jan­u­ary 6 would not have the type of infor­ma­tion­al val­ue that the Fed­er­al Records Law is meant to reach,” Sawyer said. Amer­i­can Over­sight is seek­ing records for sev­er­al oth­er Pen­ta­gon offi­cials — some of whom remain with­in gov­ern­ment ser­vice.

“For those cus­to­di­ans still with the agency, Army has ini­ti­at­ed a search for text mes­sages respon­sive to the FOIA requests, and esti­mates com­plet­ing their sup­ple­men­tal search by the end of Sep­tem­ber,” the Jus­tice Depart­ment said in the July joint fil­ing said in the case.

...

What the Pen­ta­gon was hear­ing from the White House as the Capi­tol attack unfold­ed has been a focus of the House Jan­u­ary 6 inves­ti­ga­tion, and law­mak­ers say that address­ing the secu­ri­ty laps­es of that day is an aim of their probe.

The House Jan­u­ary 6 com­mit­tee last week released tes­ti­mo­ny Miller gave to the pan­el deny­ing that for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump ever game him a for­mal order to have 10,000 troops ready to be deployed to the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6.

“I was nev­er giv­en any direc­tion or order or knew of any plans of that nature,” Miller said in the video.

...

A for­mer Defense Depart­ment offi­cial from a pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion told CNN that it is ingrained into new hires dur­ing their onboard­ing that their work devices were sub­ject to the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act and indi­cat­ed their com­mu­ni­ca­tions would be archived. The source said it was assumed when they turned in their devices at the end of their employ­ment, any com­mu­ni­ca­tion records would be archived.

————

“First on CNN: Jan. 6 text mes­sages wiped from phones of key Trump Pen­ta­gon offi­cials” by Tier­ney Sneed and Zachary Cohen; CNN; 08/02/2022

“Miller, Patel and McCarthy have all been viewed as cru­cial wit­ness­es for under­stand­ing gov­ern­men­t’s response to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol assault and for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s reac­tion to the breach. All three were involved in the Defense Depart­men­t’s response to send­ing Nation­al Guard troops to the US Capi­tol as the riot was unfold­ing. There is no sug­ges­tion that the offi­cials them­selves erased the records.”

It’s a new pan­dem­ic! A pan­dem­ic of lost text mes­sages. Which top lev­el Trump offi­cial will suc­cumb to this pan­dem­ic next? Time will tell. But the fact that three of the top Pen­ta­gon offi­cials who were direct­ly involved in the Defense Depart­men­t’s response on Jan 6 all hap­pened to lose all of their text mes­sages on that day sug­gests that A LOT of incrim­i­nat­ing texts were get­ting passed around dur­ing this peri­od in ques­tion. Don’t for­get that if these offi­cials real­ly did all con­scious­ly delete their texts as part of a col­lec­tive giant coverup, they had to know it would look awful when the coverup was reveal...but not as awful as it would have looked had they not delet­ed those text mes­sages. That’s the thing about a coverup of this nature. It’s not a hid­den coverup. It was a vast col­lec­tive coverup in plain sight that no one could pos­si­bly have expect­ed to remain hid­den. So as bad as this looks, it’s still a form of dam­age con­trol. The truth pre­sum­ably looks far worse.

Also note what we aren’t hear­ing from these three offi­cials but did hear from the top two DHS offi­cials with miss­ing texts: act­ing DHS Sec­re­tary Chad Wolf and act­ing Deputy Sec­re­tary Ken Cuc­cinel­li both insist that they did indeed turn int their phones with all of the text mes­sages intact. Any miss­ing mes­sages should be tak­en up with the offices of DHS that han­dled those phones. We are told that there’s no indi­ca­tion that these offi­cials them­selves delet­ed the mes­sages. And yet we aren’t hear­ing sim­i­lar denials from Miller, Patel, and McCarthy like we heard from Wolf and Cuc­cinel­li. That’s going to be a detail to keep an eye on as this sto­ry plays out.

But also keep in mind that the cul­pa­bil­i­ty in any coup plots are prob­a­bly very dif­fer­ent for these fig­ures. As we saw, Wolf was large­ly out of the US dur­ing the peri­od lead­ing up to the insur­rec­tion so if he can be blamed for any­thing it would be neglect. And McCarthy was oppos­ing the wild pro­pos­als of fig­ures like Fly­nn and Pow­ell, so he seems like an unlike­ly fig­ure to have a large amount of incrim­i­nat­ing evi­dence to hide. Kash Patel, on the oth­er hand, appears to be a cen­tral fig­ure in the plots to keep Trump in office. A cen­tral fig­ure who was being active­ly ele­vat­ed inside the nation­al secu­ri­ty bureau­cra­cy after Trump lost: First, Trump replaces Mark Esper with coun­tert­er­ror­ism chief Chris Miller as Defense Sec­re­tary on Novem­ber 9, 2020, days after the elec­tion. But it was Trump’s deci­sion to appoint par­ti­san hack Kash Patel as Miller’s Chief of Staff that real­ly raised eye­brows. Then, short­ly after Trump’s par­don­ing of Michael Fly­nn on Novem­ber 20, both Fly­nn and Pow­ell con­tact­ed Cohen-Wat­nick implor­ing him to take extreme mea­sures involv­ing the elec­tion. Fly­nn want­ed him to issue orders to have the mil­i­tary seize bal­lots. But it’s the request made by Pow­ell to Cohen-Wat­nick short­ly after Flynn’s call that is so inter­est­ing here: Pow­ell want­ed Cohen-Wat­nick to order some sort of mil­i­tary spe­cial forces raid to cap­ture Gina Haspel who had alleged­ly been injured dur­ing a secret mis­sion in Ger­many to destroy the servers used to steal the elec­tion from Trump. It was two week lat­er that Trump lit­er­al­ly ordered the replace­ment of Haspel’s deputy direc­tor with Patel, only to be dis­suad­ed at the very last minute, after the order had already been giv­en. And that move to make Patel the act­ing deputy direc­tor of the CIA appears to have been part of a move that could have seen Patel replace Haspel her­self as the head of the CIA. Kash Patel has A LOT of ques­tion to answer. Ques­tions direct­ly relat­ed to what was a par­tial­ly suc­cess­ful post-elec­tion plot to sub­vert the lead­er­ship of key nation­al secu­ri­ty agen­cies. It’s not exact­ly a shock to learn that Patel’s texts were mag­i­cal­ly ‘lost’.

But while Patel does­n’t appear to be shar­ing very much about what he wit­nessed dur­ing the peri­od in ques­tion, then-act­ing Sec­re­tary of Defense Christo­pher Miller is talk­ing. Accord­ing to Miller, he nev­er received a for­mal order to have 10,000 troops ready to be deployed to the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6. Don’t for­get how DHS and the FBI had reports that there could be trou­ble on Jan 6 but appar­ent­ly looked the oth­er way. That’s part of the con­text of Miller’s asser­tion that Trump nev­er gave him orders to have Nation­al Guard troops ready to deploy:

...
The House Jan­u­ary 6 com­mit­tee last week released tes­ti­mo­ny Miller gave to the pan­el deny­ing that for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump ever game him a for­mal order to have 10,000 troops ready to be deployed to the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6.

“I was nev­er giv­en any direc­tion or order or knew of any plans of that nature,” Miller said in the video.
...

Also note how soon the FOIA requests for issued for the now-miss­ing texts: days after the insur­rec­tion. It’s anoth­er piece of evi­dence under­scor­ing the absur­di­ty of the ‘whoops! We acci­den­tal­ly did­n’t save our texts!’ expla­na­tions we’re get­ting:

...
The acknowl­edg­ment that the phones from the Pen­ta­gon offi­cials had been wiped was first revealed in a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act law­suit Amer­i­can Over­sight brought against the Defense Depart­ment and the Army. The watch­dog group is seek­ing Jan­u­ary 6 records from for­mer act­ing Sec­re­tary of Defense Chris Miller, for­mer chief of staff Kash Patel, and for­mer Sec­re­tary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, among oth­er promi­nent Pen­ta­gon offi­cials — hav­ing filed ini­tial FOIA requests just a few days after the Capi­tol attack.

...

Sawyer said that her orga­ni­za­tion learned the records were not pre­served from gov­ern­ment attor­neys ear­li­er this year, and that acknowl­edg­ment was then memo­ri­al­ized in a joint sta­tus report filed with the court in March.

...

And while the FOIA requests alone would have made the lost records sub­ject to preser­va­tion under fed­er­al law, that’s not the only law that required the preser­va­tion of these records. In oth­er words, bureau­crat­ic excus­es for these lost records don’t exist. The loss of those texts was an ille­gal act:

...
After fil­ing the FOIA requests with the Defense Depart­ment and the Army, Amer­i­can Over­sight says the Pen­ta­gon acknowl­edged the request on Jan­u­ary 15, 2021. Amer­i­can Over­sight then filed a law­suit that March to force dis­clo­sure of the records. In addi­tion to the FOIA oblig­a­tions Amer­i­can Over­sight says the Pen­ta­gon has ignored in fail­ing to pre­serve the records, Sawyer also point­ed to a sep­a­rate fed­er­al records law also require that the gov­ern­ment pre­serve records that have “infor­ma­tion­al val­ue of the data in them.”

“I think it’s high­ly unlike­ly that any­one could argue with a straight face that com­mu­ni­ca­tions hap­pen­ing between these top offi­cials on Jan­u­ary 6 would not have the type of infor­ma­tion­al val­ue that the Fed­er­al Records Law is meant to reach,” Sawyer said. Amer­i­can Over­sight is seek­ing records for sev­er­al oth­er Pen­ta­gon offi­cials — some of whom remain with­in gov­ern­ment ser­vice.
...

So who com­mit­ted the crimes of delet­ing these records? Are we look­ing at a col­lec­tive coverup that was col­lec­tive­ly car­ried out indi­vid­u­al­ly? Or are we look­ing at a sit­u­a­tion where some­one inside the gov­ern­ment delet­ed those records after the fact. Again, both Wolf and Cuc­cinel­li insist they turned in their phones full of text mes­sages so some­one else delet­ed them. Is that what we’re look­ing at here with the miss­ing mes­sages of Miller, McCarthy, and Patel?

Also keep in mind we could be look­ing at a hybrid kind of coverup, where some gov­ern­ment employ­ees did indeed delete incrim­i­nat­ing texts while oth­ers duti­ful­ly turned their phones in with the texts intact. It takes ‘takes two to tan­go’ when it comes to delet­ing incrim­i­nat­ing texts. The sender and receiv­er had bet­ter both delete them, espe­cial­ly if we’re talk­ing about texts sent between gov­ern­ment employ­ee phones. So, maybe, for exam­ple, Miller and McCar­ty turned in their phones full of texts — includ­ing incrim­i­nat­ing texts from indi­vid­u­als like Patel — but Patel turned in a phone that was absurd­ly cleaned of those offend­ing texts. Imag­ine that kind of sit­u­a­tion, where only the most crim­i­nal­ly cul­pa­ble peo­ple delet­ing the incrim­i­nat­ing texts but oth­er ‘bystanders’ inside gov­ern­ment kept the texts on their phones. If that was the case, it’s not hard to imag­ine some­one inside the bureau­cra­cy furi­ous­ly just delet­ing the text records from every­one’s phones to com­plete the coverup. Yeah, it’s a bad look. But pre­sum­ably not as bad as it would have looked if we got reports that, say, just Kash Patel’s phone was miss­ing texts. And not remote­ly as bad a look as it would have looked if we could actu­al­ly read those text. As the say­ing goes, “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup”. And that’s gen­er­al­ly true for most crime. So just imag­ine how bad the crime is when the open bla­tant coverup that reeks of high crimes is a bet­ter look. Because that’s what we’re look­ing at.

How close did the US come to hav­ing the mil­i­tary seize the vot­ing machines upon Don­ald Trump’s exec­u­tive orders? That was the ques­tion raised by reports back in Jan­u­ary when we learned that the Trump White House had indeed draft­ed such orders, based on the sala­cious claims being ped­dled by con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer Sid­ney Pow­ell. Pow­ell’s claims were, in turn, based in part on the bogus claims of mass elec­tion fraud in Antrim Coun­ty, Michi­gan.

And as we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing the report, the pri­ma­ry lawyer behind those efforts, Kala­ma­zoo attor­ney Matthew DePer­no, is now set to become the next GOP nom­i­nee for the upcom­ing attor­ney’s gen­er­al race.

DePer­no is wide­ly expect­ed to secure the nom­i­na­tion based large­ly on Trump’s aggres­sive cam­paign­ing for DePer­no. But there’s a new com­pli­ca­tion: Michi­gan’s cur­rent attor­ney gen­er­al, Dana Nes­sel, just had to request a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor take over an inves­ti­ga­tion being car­ried out by her office. Why? Because it was an inves­ti­ga­tion into the ille­gal tam­per­ing of vot­ing tab­u­la­tors alleged­ly car­ried out by the teams involved with those ‘inves­ti­ga­tions’ into alleged Antrim Coun­ty vot­er fraud. And Nes­sel’s inves­ti­ga­tion has now turned up enough evi­dence to focus on the role DePer­no played in that ille­gal tam­per­ing. That cre­at­ed a con­flict of inter­est, with DePer­no being Nes­sel’s like­ly oppo­nent in the upcom­ing 2022 midterms. Hence a request for a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor.

It also turns out that DePer­no was meet­ing with a top State Depart­ment offi­cial to make his case for vot­er fraud dur­ing the Jan 6 insur­rec­tion. Yep, DePer­no was in DC lob­by­ing gov­ern­ment offi­cials dur­ing the insur­rec­tion. It’s as clue has to the larg­er net­work DePer­no was work­ing with at this point.

Regard­ing that larg­er net­work, don’t for­get some of the oth­er fig­ures involved in that ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’ in Atrim Coun­ty: Rus­sell Ram­s­land an J. Keet Lewis. Recall the crit­i­cal role CNP mem­bers Rus­sell J. Ram­s­land and J. Keet Lewis played in the lead up to the insur­rec­tion. Ramsland’s pri­vate intel­li­gence com­pa­ny, Allied Secu­ri­ty Oper­a­tions Group (ASOG), was start­ed in June 2017 by Adam T. Kraft, a for­mer senior offi­cial at the Defense Intel­li­gence Agency. Start­ing in 2018, Ram­s­land became a lead­ing GOP pur­vey­or of mass vot­er fraud alle­ga­tions. And in the days lead­ing up to the insur­rec­tion, Ram­s­land was joined by retired Army colonel and psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare expert Phil Wal­dron as they oper­at­ed in Steve Bannon’s and Rudy Giuliani’s “war room” oper­at­ing out of the Willard Hotel. Also recall how Ram­s­land issued a report mak­ing spe­cious alle­ga­tions of vot­er fraud in Antrim Coun­ty that was released as part of a court case alleg­ing vot­er fraud there. That report was based, in part, on copies of Domin­ion vot­ing sys­tem hard dri­ves. Note that the alle­ga­tions against DePer­no and vot­ing machine tam­per­ing involve ES&S machines. So at the same time we’re hear­ing about this ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’ by DePer­no that involved tam­per­ing w8ith ES&S vot­ing tab­u­la­tors being used to jus­ti­fy the mil­i­tary seizure of vot­ing machines, keep in mind the Domin­ion hard dri­ves that Ram­s­land’s Antrim ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’. In oth­er words, we should prob­a­bly view DePer­no’s ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’ as being an exten­sion of the larg­er ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ efforts being co-orches­trat­ed by the Trump White House and CNP dur­ing that post-elec­tion peri­od

Anoth­er fig­ure involved with DePer­no’s ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’ was ‘con­sti­tu­tion­al sher­iff’ Dar Leaf, of Bar­ry Coun­ty, MI. Recall how Leaf made news back in Octo­ber 2020 for his casu­al dis­missal of the mili­tia plot to kid­nap and exe­cute Michi­gan gov­er­nor Gretchen Whit­mer. It was just a plan for a ‘cit­i­zens arrests’, accord­ing to Leaf. Also recall how Leaf was found to be send­ing sher­if­f’s deputies, paired with pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors, to inter­view local elec­tions offi­cials in rela­tion to the stolen elec­tion the­o­ries cur­rent­ly being pro­mot­ed by Mike Lin­dell, the MyP­il­low Guy, in the sum­mer of 2021! So learn­ing that Leaf is a tar­get of this inves­ti­ga­tion is hard­ly shock­ing. He’s basi­cal­ly a pro-insur­rec­tion sher­iff. Or at least pro-kid­nap­ping/ex­e­cu­tion for pub­lic offi­cials

So the fig­ure behind the garbage alle­ga­tions of Antrim Coun­ty vot­er fraud that was the basis for a draft order for the mil­i­tary to seize vot­ing machines is now set to be the Trump-endorsed nom­i­nee for office that would put him in charge of Michi­gan’s future elec­tions. And he’s under inves­ti­ga­tion for vot­ing machine tam­per­ing. It’s about as sor­did a sto­ry as we should expect by now.

It sounds like the evi­dence against DePer­no is pret­ty clear: DePer­no’s team was allowed to bor­row a vot­ing tab­u­la­tor as part of their inves­ti­ga­tion, but they were allowed to open the tab­u­la­tor up and mess around with its inter­nal hard­ware . But evi­dence sug­gests that’s exact­ly what DePer­no’s team did when it made requests to Ver­i­zon for data asso­ci­at­ed with modems found into these tab­u­la­tors. Modems that could­n’t be phys­i­cal­ly accessed with­out break­ing into the machines. And as the arti­cle also reminds us, this is just one of mul­ti­ple cas­es of vot­ing machine breach­es nation­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with these ‘inves­ti­ga­tions’ by Trump sup­port­ers:

Politi­co

Michi­gan AG calls for spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor in case now involv­ing her Trump-backed oppo­nent

Dana Nessel’s office says it’s uncov­ered evi­dence tying the GOP can­di­date run­ning to unseat her to a scheme to seize and tam­per with vot­ing machines.

By Hei­di Przy­by­la
08/07/2022 07:42 PM EDT

Michigan’s attor­ney gen­er­al is request­ing a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor be named to inves­ti­gate her Trump-endorsed oppo­nent, cit­ing evi­dence tying him to a poten­tial­ly crim­i­nal scheme to seize and tam­per with vot­ing machines, accord­ing to doc­u­ments obtained by POLITICO.

The deci­sion comes after a month­s­long inves­ti­ga­tion by Michi­gan State Police and the attor­ney gen­er­al, Dana Nes­sel, into vot­ing machine breach­es that took place in sev­er­al Michi­gan coun­ties. That inves­ti­ga­tion unex­pect­ed­ly led to Kala­ma­zoo lawyer Matthew DePer­no, whom for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has tak­en an out­size inter­est in pro­mot­ing to be Michigan’s next attor­ney gen­er­al.

Accord­ing to an Aug. 5 peti­tion from Nessel’s office request­ing a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor, DePer­no, in con­cert with two oth­er peo­ple, “orches­trat­ed a coor­di­nat­ed plan to gain access to vot­ing tab­u­la­tors” that were ille­gal­ly seized from coun­ty clerks.

The peti­tion was for­mal­ly made to the Michi­gan Pros­e­cut­ing Attor­neys Coor­di­nat­ing Coun­cil, an autonomous state body. In it, Nessel’s office states that DePer­no — who has been a piv­otal fig­ure pro­mot­ing Trump’s false alle­ga­tions that the 2020 elec­tion was stolen — was present at an Oak­land Coun­ty hotel room some­time in ear­ly 2021, dur­ing which tab­u­la­tors were tam­pered with. Accord­ing to peo­ple involved in the inves­ti­ga­tion, this is among mul­ti­ple pieces of evi­dence link­ing DePer­no to the breach of sev­er­al vot­ing machines.

As it became evi­dent that DePer­no was a sub­ject of the inves­ti­ga­tion, Nessel’s office decid­ed to request a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor so as to try to avoid the appear­ance of polit­i­cal moti­va­tion, accord­ing to the request.

“When this inves­ti­ga­tion began there was not a con­flict of inter­est. How­ev­er, dur­ing the course of the inves­ti­ga­tion, facts were devel­oped that DePer­no was one of the prime insti­ga­tors of the con­spir­a­cy,” says the peti­tion. “A con­flict aris­es when ‘the pros­e­cut­ing attor­ney has a per­son­al inter­est (finan­cial or emo­tion­al) in the lit­i­ga­tion,’” it says.

...

DePer­no is set to for­mal­ly receive the GOP nom­i­na­tion for attor­ney gen­er­al lat­er this month after win­ning the endorse­ment of par­ty del­e­gates in April. Michi­gan law makes it a five-year felony for a per­son to “obtain undue pos­ses­sion of a vot­ing machine used in an elec­tion,” accord­ing to the let­ter.

...

DePer­no led a Novem­ber 2020 law­suit against the state’s Antrim Coun­ty over an elec­tion night tab­u­la­tion error that was quick­ly fixed but which Trump and his allies seized on to claim the entire pres­i­den­tial elec­tion was fraud­u­lent. Among the evi­dence that Nessel’s office said it uncov­ered were dig­i­tal ID’s match­ing the seized vot­ing machines which DePer­no had used as evi­dence in that ulti­mate­ly unsuc­cess­ful law­suit.

DePer­no raised hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars as he pur­sued the suit, and his bogus claims about Antrim end­ed up in a Trump White House draft exec­u­tive order direct­ing the mil­i­tary to seize vot­ing machines nation­al­ly. The order was nev­er issued but came to light as part of a U.S. House inves­ti­ga­tion into the Capi­tol riot.

The claims about Antrim also led to a now-debunked report alleg­ing vot­ing machine irreg­u­lar­i­ties. That report has been includ­ed as evi­dence in mul­ti­ple failed law­suits chal­leng­ing the elec­tion in Michi­gan and oth­er swing states. Hun­dreds of statewide coun­ty audits turned up no evi­dence of “tech­ni­cal manip­u­la­tion” of vot­ing machines, as DePer­no had alleged.

DePer­no was also involved in a so-called audit of the 2020 pres­i­den­tial vote in Ari­zona that ulti­mate­ly con­firmed Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry. Dur­ing the Jan. 6 riot at the Capi­tol, he met with a top Trump offi­cial at the State Depart­ment to dis­cuss “how the elec­tion was stolen.”

Trump, in return, has show­ered DePer­no with his sup­port. He endorsed his attor­ney gen­er­al cam­paign near­ly a year ago. In March, he held a fundrais­er for DePer­no at his Mar-a-Lago res­i­dence and stumped for him in Michi­gan a month lat­er.

“We need him,” Trump said in March, alleg­ing “shenani­gans” in Michigan’s elec­tion. “This is some­body that can fix it. There aren’t that many peo­ple around that can do it,” he said. “I talked him into doing it.”

‘Insid­er threats’

The new alle­ga­tions against DePer­no come as elec­tion secu­ri­ty experts have raised ques­tions about whether indi­vid­u­als involved in Trump’s elec­tion con­spir­a­cies could pose “insid­er threats” or abuse their posi­tions of author­i­ty in upcom­ing elec­tions. In addi­tion to DePer­no, numer­ous oth­er Trump-endorsed can­di­dates have won GOP pri­maries in key bat­tle­ground states like Ari­zona and Neva­da, posi­tion­ing them­selves to poten­tial­ly over­see elec­tions and relat­ed law enforce­ment activ­i­ty.

So far, there have been at least eight known attempts to gain unau­tho­rized access to vot­ing sys­tems in five states, accord­ing to a Reuters inves­ti­ga­tion. That includes Col­orado, where Mesa Coun­ty Clerk Tina Peters faces sev­er­al felony charges for her alleged role in allow­ing unau­tho­rized peo­ple to break into her county’s elec­tion sys­tem in search of proof of the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

In addi­tion to request­ing a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor, Nes­sel also sent a sum­ma­ry of ini­tial find­ings to Sec­re­tary of State Joce­lyn Ben­son.

“We have request­ed the appoint­ment of a Spe­cial Pros­e­cut­ing Attor­ney (“SPA”) to review the case for the issuance of pos­si­ble crim­i­nal charges against sev­er­al of the indi­vid­u­als involved. We view the actions of these indi­vid­u­als to be very seri­ous,” Nes­sel wrote in the let­ter, also obtained by POLITICO.

As of last week­end, DePer­no still had a link on his law firm’s web­site to a May 2021 inter­view he gave to the con­ser­v­a­tive One Amer­i­ca News Net­work fea­tur­ing “a sys­tems vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty expert” using a tab­u­la­tor cov­ered in red duct tape to demon­strate how votes could be flipped. It is not clear from the video if that was one of the com­pro­mised machines. The attor­ney general’s office declined to com­ment.

Sequence of events

Nessel’s inves­ti­ga­tion began in Feb­ru­ary of this year after the sec­re­tary of state asked her office and Michi­gan State Police to look into reports that tab­u­lat­ing machines and data hard dri­ves had been unlaw­ful­ly accessed by an unnamed third par­ty in Roscom­mon Coun­ty.

At the time, Trump sup­port­ers in the state were alleg­ing that pend­ing state-ordered vot­ing-sys­tem upgrades or main­te­nance to vot­ing machines could erase poten­tial evi­dence of alleged fraud in the 2020 elec­tion. Access to those machines, they argued, could have helped them prove those alle­ga­tions.

Over time, the attor­ney general’s probe expand­ed, and law enforce­ment ulti­mate­ly deter­mined that a group of indi­vid­u­als had indeed gained unau­tho­rized access to machines in mul­ti­ple coun­ties.

In the sum­ma­ry of find­ings, the attor­ney gen­er­al repeat­ed­ly refers to suc­cess­ful over­tures made by “Per­son 1” to coun­ty clerks to obtain vote tab­u­la­tors, soft­ware and USB dri­ves, claim­ing they were need­ed for an inves­ti­ga­tion “into elec­tion fraud.” It is unclear from the sum­ma­ry who Per­son 1 is.

“At the time the tab­u­la­tors were obtained, Per­son 1 assured each sep­a­rate clerk that they would be returned in just a few days,” the sum­ma­ry reads. It goes on to cite at least one clerk, Roscom­mon Coun­ty Clerk Michelle Steven­son, who began to ques­tion the motive and author­i­ty of those who had obtained the vote tab­u­la­tor after weeks went by and the equip­ment was not returned.

Days after the tab­u­la­tors were final­ly returned to the Roscom­mon clerk in ear­ly April of 2021, DePer­no issued a sub­poe­na to Ver­i­zon seek­ing more detailed infor­ma­tion on the tab­u­la­tors. That sub­poe­na includ­ed modem ID num­bers of two Rich­field Town­ship tab­u­la­tors and one from Roscom­mon Coun­ty.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the com­pa­ny that man­u­fac­tures the machines, Elec­tion Sys­tems & Soft­ware, con­firmed to the attor­ney general’s office the only way those ID num­bers could be obtained would be to “break open the secu­ri­ty seals and phys­i­cal­ly remove the out­er pan­els,” the let­ter says.

ES&S also con­firmed to the attor­ney gen­er­al that it found no evi­dence in result­ing soft­ware or firmware manip­u­la­tion. All of the tab­u­la­tors at issue were decom­mis­sioned before the Aug. 2 pri­ma­ry elec­tion and are being held as evi­dence for a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor.

Alleged co-con­spir­a­tors

DePer­no wasn’t the only indi­vid­ual list­ed in Nessel’s sum­ma­ry of her office’s find­ings. She also referred Ste­fanie Lam­bert, who was reg­is­tered as DePerno’s sosole law part­ner, to the spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor.

Oth­ers referred to the spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor include Michi­gan state Rep. Daire Ren­don, who was also involved in a plot to advance a false slate of Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial elec­tors false­ly claim­ing Trump won Michi­gan. It is alleged by Nessel’s office that DePer­no, Lam­bert and Ren­don “orches­trat­ed” the effort to obtain and access the tab­u­la­tor. Bar­ry Coun­ty Sher­iff Dar Leaf, who’s been pur­su­ing his own “vot­er fraud inves­ti­ga­tion” after review­ing doc­u­ments from Michael Lin­dell, the Trump-allied CEO of MyP­il­low, is also on the list referred to the spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor.

Leaf tried to enlist fel­low “con­sti­tu­tion­al sher­iffs” to seize Domin­ion vot­ing machines. Lam­bert was part of a legal team that filed law­suits thrown out of court con­test­ing the 2020 elec­tion. Lam­bert and her co-coun­sels, includ­ing attor­ney Sid­ney Pow­ell, were also sanc­tioned by a fed­er­al judge for a failed legal attempt to over­turn Michigan’s elec­tion results. Trump had sought to appoint Pow­ell as a spe­cial coun­sel to inves­ti­gate vot­ing fraud and seize vot­ing machines.

...

———-

“Michi­gan AG calls for spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor in case now involv­ing her Trump-backed oppo­nent”
by Hei­di Przy­by­la; Politi­co; 08/07/2022

“The peti­tion was for­mal­ly made to the Michi­gan Pros­e­cut­ing Attor­neys Coor­di­nat­ing Coun­cil, an autonomous state body. In it, Nessel’s office states that DePer­no — who has been a piv­otal fig­ure pro­mot­ing Trump’s false alle­ga­tions that the 2020 elec­tion was stolen — was present at an Oak­land Coun­ty hotel room some­time in ear­ly 2021, dur­ing which tab­u­la­tors were tam­pered with. Accord­ing to peo­ple involved in the inves­ti­ga­tion, this is among mul­ti­ple pieces of evi­dence link­ing DePer­no to the breach of sev­er­al vot­ing machines.”

The alle­ga­tions by Michi­gan Attor­ney Gen­er­al Dana Nes­sel is pret­ty straight­for­ward: Kala­ma­zoo lawyer Matthew DePer­no was in the room when vot­ing tab­u­la­tors were tam­pered with. Tam­per­ing that took place dur­ing the time when DePer­no was lead­ing the Trump-fueled ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’ into alleged vot­er fraud in Antrim Coun­ty. An inves­ti­ga­tion that appar­ent­ly involved the ille­gal tam­per­ing of the vote tab­u­la­tors DePer­no’s team obtained as part of their ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’. It turns out DePer­no’s inves­ti­ga­tion involved mak­ing requests to Ver­i­zon about the inter­net traf­fic asso­ci­at­ed with the modems inside those tabulators...something he could­n’t have done with­out first open­ing up those machines. The evi­dence is clear:

...
Nessel’s inves­ti­ga­tion began in Feb­ru­ary of this year after the sec­re­tary of state asked her office and Michi­gan State Police to look into reports that tab­u­lat­ing machines and data hard dri­ves had been unlaw­ful­ly accessed by an unnamed third par­ty in Roscom­mon Coun­ty.

...

In the sum­ma­ry of find­ings, the attor­ney gen­er­al repeat­ed­ly refers to suc­cess­ful over­tures made by “Per­son 1” to coun­ty clerks to obtain vote tab­u­la­tors, soft­ware and USB dri­ves, claim­ing they were need­ed for an inves­ti­ga­tion “into elec­tion fraud.” It is unclear from the sum­ma­ry who Per­son 1 is.

“At the time the tab­u­la­tors were obtained, Per­son 1 assured each sep­a­rate clerk that they would be returned in just a few days,” the sum­ma­ry reads. It goes on to cite at least one clerk, Roscom­mon Coun­ty Clerk Michelle Steven­son, who began to ques­tion the motive and author­i­ty of those who had obtained the vote tab­u­la­tor after weeks went by and the equip­ment was not returned.

Days after the tab­u­la­tors were final­ly returned to the Roscom­mon clerk in ear­ly April of 2021, DePer­no issued a sub­poe­na to Ver­i­zon seek­ing more detailed infor­ma­tion on the tab­u­la­tors. That sub­poe­na includ­ed modem ID num­bers of two Rich­field Town­ship tab­u­la­tors and one from Roscom­mon Coun­ty.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the com­pa­ny that man­u­fac­tures the machines, Elec­tion Sys­tems & Soft­ware, con­firmed to the attor­ney general’s office the only way those ID num­bers could be obtained would be to “break open the secu­ri­ty seals and phys­i­cal­ly remove the out­er pan­els,” the let­ter says.
...

And then we get to the tru­ly omi­nous reports about how DePer­no’s ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’ was appar­ent­ly being used as a pre­text by the Trump White House to have the mil­i­tary seize vot­ing machines. It’s one of the details that under­scores just how close­ly DePer­no’s efforts were being coor­di­nat­ed with the White House:

...
DePer­no led a Novem­ber 2020 law­suit against the state’s Antrim Coun­ty over an elec­tion night tab­u­la­tion error that was quick­ly fixed but which Trump and his allies seized on to claim the entire pres­i­den­tial elec­tion was fraud­u­lent. Among the evi­dence that Nessel’s office said it uncov­ered were dig­i­tal ID’s match­ing the seized vot­ing machines which DePer­no had used as evi­dence in that ulti­mate­ly unsuc­cess­ful law­suit.

DePer­no raised hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars as he pur­sued the suit, and his bogus claims about Antrim end­ed up in a Trump White House draft exec­u­tive order direct­ing the mil­i­tary to seize vot­ing machines nation­al­ly. The order was nev­er issued but came to light as part of a U.S. House inves­ti­ga­tion into the Capi­tol riot.

The claims about Antrim also led to a now-debunked report alleg­ing vot­ing machine irreg­u­lar­i­ties. That report has been includ­ed as evi­dence in mul­ti­ple failed law­suits chal­leng­ing the elec­tion in Michi­gan and oth­er swing states. Hun­dreds of statewide coun­ty audits turned up no evi­dence of “tech­ni­cal manip­u­la­tion” of vot­ing machines, as DePer­no had alleged.
...

And then we get to the involve­ment of fig­ures like far right ‘con­sti­tu­tion­al sher­iff’ Dar Leaf. Recall how Leaf was found to be send­ing sher­if­f’s deputies, paired with pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors, to inter­view local elec­tions offi­cials in rela­tion to the stolen elec­tion the­o­ries cur­rent­ly being pro­mot­ed by Mike Lin­dell, the MyP­il­low Guy, in the sum­mer of 2021! So learn­ing that Leaf is a tar­get of this inves­ti­ga­tion is hard­ly shock­ing. He’s basi­cal­ly a pro-insur­rec­tion sher­iff. Or at least pro-kid­nap­ping/ex­e­cu­tion for pub­lic offi­cials:

...
Oth­ers referred to the spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor include Michi­gan state Rep. Daire Ren­don, who was also involved in a plot to advance a false slate of Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial elec­tors false­ly claim­ing Trump won Michi­gan. It is alleged by Nessel’s office that DePer­no, Lam­bert and Ren­don “orches­trat­ed” the effort to obtain and access the tab­u­la­tor. Bar­ry Coun­ty Sher­iff Dar Leaf, who’s been pur­su­ing his own “vot­er fraud inves­ti­ga­tion” after review­ing doc­u­ments from Michael Lin­dell, the Trump-allied CEO of MyP­il­low, is also on the list referred to the spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor.

Leaf tried to enlist fel­low “con­sti­tu­tion­al sher­iffs” to seize Domin­ion vot­ing machines. Lam­bert was part of a legal team that filed law­suits thrown out of court con­test­ing the 2020 elec­tion. Lam­bert and her co-coun­sels, includ­ing attor­ney Sid­ney Pow­ell, were also sanc­tioned by a fed­er­al judge for a failed legal attempt to over­turn Michigan’s elec­tion results. Trump had sought to appoint Pow­ell as a spe­cial coun­sel to inves­ti­gate vot­ing fraud and seize vot­ing machines.
...

Adding to the evi­dence that DePer­no’s efforts were part of a broad­er nation­al effort being orches­trat­ed by the Trump White House and CNP is the fact that he was report­ed­ly meet­ing with a top Trump offi­cial at the State Depart­ment to dis­cuss the stolen elec­tion claims dur­ing the Jan 6 insur­rec­tion:

...
DePer­no was also involved in a so-called audit of the 2020 pres­i­den­tial vote in Ari­zona that ulti­mate­ly con­firmed Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry. Dur­ing the Jan. 6 riot at the Capi­tol, he met with a top Trump offi­cial at the State Depart­ment to dis­cuss “how the elec­tion was stolen.”
...

But the strongest indi­ca­tion that DePer­no’s ‘inves­ti­ga­tion’ was done with Trump’s full back­ing is reflect­ed by the fact that DePer­no is set to receive the GOP nom­i­na­tion to be the next attor­ney gen­er­al of Michi­gan. A nom­i­na­tion he won thanks large­ly to Trump’s show­ing of sup­port. That’s why Attor­ney Gen­er­al Nes­sel has to request a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor to avoid a con­flict of inter­est: Math­ew DePer­no is Nes­sel’s like­ly upcom­ing oppo­nent in the upcom­ing mid-terms. It’s the f#ck up cher­ry on top of an utter­ly f$ck up sit­u­a­tion:

...
As it became evi­dent that DePer­no was a sub­ject of the inves­ti­ga­tion, Nessel’s office decid­ed to request a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor so as to try to avoid the appear­ance of polit­i­cal moti­va­tion, accord­ing to the request.

“When this inves­ti­ga­tion began there was not a con­flict of inter­est. How­ev­er, dur­ing the course of the inves­ti­ga­tion, facts were devel­oped that DePer­no was one of the prime insti­ga­tors of the con­spir­a­cy,” says the peti­tion. “A con­flict aris­es when ‘the pros­e­cut­ing attor­ney has a per­son­al inter­est (finan­cial or emo­tion­al) in the lit­i­ga­tion,’” it says.

...

DePer­no is set to for­mal­ly receive the GOP nom­i­na­tion for attor­ney gen­er­al lat­er this month after win­ning the endorse­ment of par­ty del­e­gates in April. Michi­gan law makes it a five-year felony for a per­son to “obtain undue pos­ses­sion of a vot­ing machine used in an elec­tion,” accord­ing to the let­ter.

...

Trump, in return, has show­ered DePer­no with his sup­port. He endorsed his attor­ney gen­er­al cam­paign near­ly a year ago. In March, he held a fundrais­er for DePer­no at his Mar-a-Lago res­i­dence and stumped for him in Michi­gan a month lat­er.

“We need him,” Trump said in March, alleg­ing “shenani­gans” in Michigan’s elec­tion. “This is some­body that can fix it. There aren’t that many peo­ple around that can do it,” he said. “I talked him into doing it.”
...

Final­ly, don’t for­get that this is mere­ly one of eight known attempts to gain unau­tho­rized access to vot­ing sys­tems by pro-Trump groups alleg­ing fraud. So with DePer­no poised to poten­tial­ly become the lead­ing law enforce­ment offi­cial in the state of Michi­gan, we have to ask how many oth­er bla­tant insid­er threats like this are there at this point?

...
The new alle­ga­tions against DePer­no come as elec­tion secu­ri­ty experts have raised ques­tions about whether indi­vid­u­als involved in Trump’s elec­tion con­spir­a­cies could pose “insid­er threats” or abuse their posi­tions of author­i­ty in upcom­ing elec­tions. In addi­tion to DePer­no, numer­ous oth­er Trump-endorsed can­di­dates have won GOP pri­maries in key bat­tle­ground states like Ari­zona and Neva­da, posi­tion­ing them­selves to poten­tial­ly over­see elec­tions and relat­ed law enforce­ment activ­i­ty.

So far, there have been at least eight known attempts to gain unau­tho­rized access to vot­ing sys­tems in five states, accord­ing to a Reuters inves­ti­ga­tion. That includes Col­orado, where Mesa Coun­ty Clerk Tina Peters faces sev­er­al felony charges for her alleged role in allow­ing unau­tho­rized peo­ple to break into her county’s elec­tion sys­tem in search of proof of the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.
...

Yes, the GOP isn’t just nom­i­nat­ing ‘elec­tion deniers’ to the very offices that will be over­see­ing future elec­tions. The par­ty is nom­i­nat­ing the fig­ures who were direct­ly involved in ille­gal tam­per­ing of vot­ing machines. Prac­tice makes per­fect. So as we can see, Dana Nes­sel’s con­flict of inter­est in inves­ti­gat­ing her own oppo­nent is far the only con­flict of inter­est in this sto­ry.

You know you’re in a weird place when the unprece­dent­ed feels inevitable. And yet it’s hard to shake the feel­ing that the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago yes­ter­day — an unprece­dent­ed legal action against a for­mer pres­i­dent — was kind of inevitable. An ulti­mate legal con­vic­tion of Trump still does­n’t feel at all inevitable. But some sort of crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into at least one of the acts of open crim­i­nal­i­ty seemed like just a mat­ter of time, if noth­ing else for the Depart­ment of Jus­tice to main­tain some sort of pre­tense of rule of law. It’s why the news of the FBI raid was cer­tain­ly a sur­prise in terms of tim­ing, but not real­ly a huge sur­prise that it hap­pened.

As we’re going to see, this sto­ry has been build­ing since Jan­u­ary of this year, when 15 box­es full of clas­si­fied mate­ri­als were report­ed­ly retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. At the time, we were told that the con­tents of seized box­es would be stud­ied and fur­ther action would be deter­mined. We just got an idea of what that fur­ther action would be: the FBI went back to search fore more doc­u­ments. So we know the Depart­ment of Jus­tice appar­ent­ly deter­mined that the 15 box­es seized in Jan­u­ary did­n’t con­tain all of the clas­si­fied mate­ri­als tak­en from the White House. Whether that deter­mi­na­tion was made based on the con­tents found in the box­es, vs con­tent expect­ed but not found in the box­es, remains to be seen.

It sounds like part of what drove this cri­sis of tak­en clas­si­fied mate­ri­als is the fact that Trump was rou­tine­ly tak­ing clas­si­fied mate­ri­als to Mar-a-Lago through­out his pres­i­den­cy. But it also sounds like anoth­er fac­tor is that Trump sim­ply did­n’t review doc­u­ments for the Nation­al Archives like he was sup­posed to be doing dur­ing the tran­si­tion peri­od after the 2020 elec­tion. Because of course he was­n’t. Trump was plot­ting to stay in office dur­ing this peri­od. So while it’s not clear if any of the stolen clas­si­fied doc­u­ments are direct­ly relat­ed to Jan 6, they’re at least tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed in the sense that all the plot­ting around Jan 6 was done instead of the nor­mal tran­si­tion work like trans­fer­ring mate­ri­als to the Nation­al Archives. It points to one of the major legal mys­ter­ies here: how many of these clas­si­fied doc­u­ments were tak­en because of the con­tent of the doc­u­ments them­selves vs being tak­en sim­ply because Trump did­n’t have time review them because he was too busy plot­ting a coup.

Oh, and in oth­er inevitable-feel­ing news relat­ed to this sto­ry, the FBI raid trig­ger­ing for calls for civ­il war from Trump-sup­port­ing cir­cles. Includ­ing mem­bers of Con­gress like Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene. Because of course. This is where we are:

Salon

Cries of “civ­il war” reach fever pitch after FBI search of Mar-a-Lago
Don­ald Trump’s fan erupt in anger after the for­mer pres­i­den­t’s res­i­dence was raid­ed by the feds

By Abi­gail Gold­berg-Zeliz­er
Pub­lished August 9, 2022 2:26PM (EDT)

In the hours fol­low­ing the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion’s search of for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, his sup­port­ers began ral­ly­ing around the cry of “civ­il war.”

The search, which took place Mon­day night, was car­ried out as a part of an inves­ti­ga­tion into Trump’s mis­han­dling of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments from his time in office. The FBI was report­ed­ly search­ing the estate for box­es of fed­er­al doc­u­ments that they believe Trump brought back from the White House, although fed­er­al author­i­ties have not con­firmed. The act of tak­ing clas­si­fied doc­u­ments from the White House is con­sid­ered a vio­la­tion of fed­er­al law.

Trump imme­di­ate­ly released a state­ment claim­ing that the search was com­pa­ra­ble to the Water­gate Scan­dal of 1972, when for­mer Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tives broke into the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion.

“My beau­ti­ful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach Flori­da is cur­rent­ly under siege, raid­ed, and occu­pied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a state­ment. “Such an assault could only take place in bro­ken, Third-World Coun­tries. Sad­ly, Amer­i­ca has now become one of those Coun­tries, cor­rupt at a lev­el not seen before. They even broke into my safe!”

In the moments fol­low­ing to search, MAGA world erupt­ed.

Far right extrem­ist groups, like QAnon, imme­di­ate­ly called for a vio­lent response to the search and clas­si­fied it as a polit­i­cal attack by the Biden admin­is­tra­tion. Hun­dreds of Trump sup­port­ers gath­ered out­side Mar-a-Lago to protest the inves­ti­ga­tion.

Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, the term “civ­il war” start­ed trend­ing on Twit­ter.

The Feds are cur­rent­ly RAIDING Mar-A-Lago.This could very well be the equiv­a­lent of the FIRST SHOT fired upon Fort Sumter.I believe they want a civ­il war. What oth­er out­come can this bullsh!t lead to?— ???????? Patri­ot Maga Ris­ing (@MagaRisingJohn) August 8, 2022

Vocal far-right con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, R‑GA, called the search an act of “polit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion.”

“This is the rogue behav­ior of com­mu­nist coun­tries, NOT the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca!!!,” Greene tweet­ed. “These are the type of things that hap­pen in coun­tries dur­ing civ­il war.”

The FBI is raid­ing Pres­i­dent Trump’s home in Maralago!This is the rogue behav­ior of com­mu­nist coun­tries, NOT the Unit­ed States of America!!!These are the type of things that hap­pen in coun­tries dur­ing civ­il war.The polit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion MUST STOP!!! pic.twitter.com/i4DYygLsvj— Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene???? (@RepMTG) August 8, 2022

Stephen Miller, a for­mer senior advis­er to Trump, hopped on Fox News to call the FBI an agent of an impe­r­i­al gov­ern­ment.

“We are tru­ly liv­ing in a sit­u­a­tion where the FBI has become a prae­to­ri­an guard from Rome where they take it unto them­selves to decide who wields pow­er in this coun­try,” Miller said.

GOP con­gres­sion­al can­di­date Lau­ra Loomer agreed that the FBI search was an act of war.

“Time to take the gloves off. It’s been time. If you’re a free­dom lov­ing Amer­i­can, you must remove the Words deco­rum and civil­i­ty from your vocab­u­lary. This is a WAR!,” Loomer wrote on her Telegram chan­nel. Loomer has been banned from Twit­ter since 2018 when she post­ed racist tweets about Rep. Ilhan Omar, D‑Minn.

The cries of “civ­il war” fall in line with a shock­ing sur­vey pub­lished in July that half of Amer­i­cans believe the Unit­ed States is head­ed towards a civ­il war.

Researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia-Davis Vio­lence Pre­ven­tion Research Pro­gram and the Cal­i­for­nia Vio­lence Research Cen­ter found that 50.1 per­cent of sur­vey respon­dents at least some­what agree that a civ­il war will hap­pen soon. About 14 per­cent said that they either “strong­ly” or “very strong­ly” agree.

The researchers said that the study was sparked by the Unit­ed States’ cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate and Trump’s per­pet­u­a­tion of “The Big Lie.”

“The moti­vat­ing premis­es for this sur­vey were that cur­rent con­di­tions in the US cre­ate both per­ceived threats and actu­al threats to its future as a free and demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety,” they wrote. “The find­ings bear out both premis­es.”

...

———–

“Cries of “civ­il war” reach fever pitch after FBI search of Mar-a-Lago” by Abi­gail Gold­berg-Zeliz­er; Salon; 08/09/2022

“Far right extrem­ist groups, like QAnon, imme­di­ate­ly called for a vio­lent response to the search and clas­si­fied it as a polit­i­cal attack by the Biden admin­is­tra­tion. Hun­dreds of Trump sup­port­ers gath­ered out­side Mar-a-Lago to protest the inves­ti­ga­tion.”

That did­n’t take long. As expect­ed, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago imme­di­ate­ly trig­gered calls for vio­lence and civ­il war. It’s had to be a com­pli­ca­tion in the DOJ’s deci­sion to send the FBI to car­ry out the raid. These calls for vio­lence were high­ly pre­dictable. Includ­ing the calls from mem­bers of con­gress like Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene:

...
Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, the term “civ­il war” start­ed trend­ing on Twit­ter.

The Feds are cur­rent­ly RAIDING Mar-A-Lago.This could very well be the equiv­a­lent of the FIRST SHOT fired upon Fort Sumter.I believe they want a civ­il war. What oth­er out­come can this bullsh!t lead to?— ???????? Patri­ot Maga Ris­ing (@MagaRisingJohn) August 8, 2022

Vocal far-right con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, R‑GA, called the search an act of “polit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion.”

“This is the rogue behav­ior of com­mu­nist coun­tries, NOT the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca!!!,” Greene tweet­ed. “These are the type of things that hap­pen in coun­tries dur­ing civ­il war.”
...

Now, an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to seize clas­si­fied doc­u­ments seems unlike­ly to actu­al­ly pre­cip­i­tate vio­lence on its own. It’s not like Trump or any­one else has been arrest­ed. So it’s worth not­ing the warn­ings from legal experts issued back in Feb­ru­ary when the sto­ry of the miss­ing clas­si­fied doc­u­ments ini­tial­ly broke. As those experts warned, while it was cer­tain­ly improp­er for Trump to keep box­es of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments at Mar-a-Lago, the bar is still going to be pret­ty high in terms of any actu­al pros­e­cu­tion of a for­mer pres­i­dent over these kinds of mat­ters giv­en a pres­i­den­t’s pow­ers to view all doc­u­ments of any clas­si­fi­ca­tion and declas­si­fy mate­ri­als. After seiz­ing 15 box­es of mate­ri­als in Jan­u­ary it was up to the FBI to review that mate­r­i­al and deter­mine next steps. Flash for­ward sev­en months and we have this FBI raid. It sug­gests they found some pret­ty seri­ous vio­la­tions.

But as these experts also warned back in Feb­ru­ary, the inves­ti­ga­tion isn’t poten­tial­ly lim­it­ed to Trump. There’s also ques­tions of who actu­al­ly trans­ferred the box­es to Mar-a-Lago and whether they knew about the con­tents of the box­es at the time. As we’ll see, Trump was report­ed­ly very secre­tive about the pack­ing of box­es that were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago back in Jan­u­ary, and did not let oth­er aides — includ­ing some of his most senior advis­ers — look at them. So that sug­gests Trump was aware that he had effec­tive­ly con­tra­band on his res­i­dences. How many oth­er peo­ple knew? That’s pre­sum­ably part of the inves­ti­ga­tion.

It also sounds like part of the cir­cum­stances that trig­gered this mess is the fact that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion was rushed to car­ry out its role with the Nation­al Archives dur­ing the post-elec­tion tran­si­tion peri­od. A tran­si­tion peri­od, of course, over­lapped with the plot to over­turn the elec­tion cul­mi­nat­ing in the Jan 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. We’re told Trump began review­ing mate­ri­als in Decem­ber 2020 after staff received the requests from Gary Stern, a long­time Archives lawyer. So how much actu­al review did Trump — who was not plan­ning on leav­ing the White House — do of these doc­u­ments dur­ing this peri­od? It’s kind of hard to imag­ine him hon­est­ly review­ing any doc­u­ments dur­ing this peri­od.

And that’s all part of the con­text of this unprece­dent­ed FBI raid on the res­i­dence of a for­mer pres­i­dent: while it’s pos­si­ble Trump took troves of high­ly clas­si­fied doc­u­ments because he want­ed to keep them hid­den, it’s also very pos­si­ble that a lot of these doc­u­ments were tak­en sim­ply because Trump did­n’t spend the time review­ing them because he was­n’t plan­ning on leav­ing office until he had no choice. So while these doc­u­ments may not be direct­ly relat­ed to Jan 6, the with­hold­ing of the doc­u­ments could indeed be very Jan 6‑related in the sense that Trump had to choose been plot­ting for Jan 6 or car­ry­ing out his nor­mal tran­si­tion duties like review­ing clas­si­fied mate­ri­als for archiv­ing. And he made his choice:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Some Trump records tak­en to Mar-a-Lago clear­ly marked as clas­si­fied, includ­ing doc­u­ments at ‘top secret’ lev­el

The exis­tence of doc­u­ments offi­cial­ly labeled as clas­si­fied in the trove — which has not pre­vi­ous­ly been report­ed — rais­es new ques­tions about why the mate­ri­als were tak­en out of the White House.

By Jacque­line Ale­many, Devlin Bar­rett, Matt Zapo­to­sky and Josh Dawsey
Feb­ru­ary 10, 2022 at 5:18 p.m. EST

Some of the White House doc­u­ments that Don­ald Trump improp­er­ly took to his Mar-a-Lago res­i­dence were clear­ly marked as clas­si­fied, includ­ing doc­u­ments at the “top secret” lev­el, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter.

The exis­tence of clear­ly marked clas­si­fied doc­u­ments in the trove — which has not pre­vi­ous­ly been report­ed — is like­ly to inten­si­fy the legal pres­sure that Trump or his staffers could face, and rais­es new ques­tions about why the mate­ri­als were tak­en out of the White House.

While it was unclear how many clas­si­fied doc­u­ments were among those received by the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion, some bore mark­ings that the infor­ma­tion was extreme­ly sen­si­tive and would be lim­it­ed to a small group of offi­cials with author­i­ty to view such high­ly clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, the two peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

The mark­ings were dis­cov­ered by the Nation­al Archives, which last month arranged for the col­lec­tion of 15 box­es of doc­u­ments from the for­mer president’s Mar-a-Lago res­i­dence. Archives offi­cials asked the Jus­tice Depart­ment to look into the mat­ter, though as of Thurs­day after­noon FBI agents had yet to review the mate­ri­als, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the request.

It remained unclear whether the Jus­tice Depart­ment would launch a full-fledged inves­ti­ga­tion. The files were being stored in a sen­si­tive com­part­ment­ed infor­ma­tion facil­i­ty, also known as an SCIF, while Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cials debat­ed how to pro­ceed, the two peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

...

Trump spokesman Tay­lor Budowich said: “It is clear that a nor­mal and rou­tine process is being weaponized by anony­mous, polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed gov­ern­ment sources to ped­dle Fake News. The only enti­ty with the abil­i­ty to cred­i­bly dis­pute this false report­ing, the Nation­al Archives, is pro­vid­ing no com­ment.”

Trump’s years-long defi­ance of the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act, which requires the preser­va­tion of mem­os, let­ters, notes, emails, fax­es and oth­er writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions relat­ed to a president’s offi­cial duties, and oth­er unusu­al record-keep­ing prac­tices have long drawn scruti­ny. In 2018, for exam­ple, Politi­co report­ed on his pen­chant for rip­ping up offi­cial doc­u­ments. But in recent weeks, Trump’s activ­i­ties have gen­er­at­ed new atten­tion — in large part because of the House select committee’s inves­ti­ga­tion of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capi­tol.

The Wash­ing­ton Post report­ed late last month that some of the White House records the Nation­al Archives turned over to the com­mit­tee appeared to have been torn apart and then taped back togeth­er. The Post lat­er report­ed that offi­cials had recov­ered 15 box­es of pres­i­den­tial records from Mar-a-Lago, and that they sus­pect­ed Trump had pos­si­bly vio­lat­ed laws con­cern­ing the han­dling of gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments — includ­ing those that might be con­sid­ered clas­si­fied.

A “top secret” clas­si­fi­ca­tion is applied to infor­ma­tion where unau­tho­rized dis­clo­sure “could be expect­ed to cause excep­tion­al­ly grave dam­age to the nation­al secu­ri­ty,” accord­ing to the Archives’s Infor­ma­tion Secu­ri­ty Over­sight Office..

Offi­cials even keep secret some of the mechan­ics of how the gov­ern­ment cat­e­go­rizes and stores its secrets, but in dai­ly prac­tice often refer to clas­si­fied sys­tems as “the high side” and unclas­si­fied gov­ern­ment sys­tems as “the low side.” On the high side, there are dif­fer­ent types of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion with­in “top secret” that are restrict­ed to small­er groups of offi­cials on a need-to-know basis, includ­ing a broad cat­e­go­ry referred to as Spe­cial Access Pro­grams, or SAP.

Even with doc­u­ments marked clas­si­fied found where they don’t belong, pros­e­cu­tors have a high legal bar to get to crim­i­nal charges. Pros­e­cu­tors would have to prove some­one inten­tion­al­ly mis­han­dled the mate­r­i­al or was gross­ly neg­li­gent in doing so — which can be a steep hur­dle in its own right. And Trump, as pres­i­dent, would have had unfet­tered lat­i­tude to declas­si­fy mate­r­i­al, poten­tial­ly rais­ing even big­ger chal­lenges to bring­ing a case against him.

For­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor Bran­don Van Grack said that some of the laws about clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion require some­one to act “with­out autho­riza­tion, and poten­tial­ly the pres­i­dent would be able to argue he gave him­self that autho­riza­tion.”

But — regard­less of whether a crim­i­nal case could be sub­stan­ti­at­ed — Van Grack said that “the FBI would want and need to review the infor­ma­tion and con­duct an inves­ti­ga­tion to deter­mine what occurred and whether any sources and meth­ods were com­pro­mised.”

It is not pre­cise­ly clear who packed up the clas­si­fied mate­ri­als at Mar-a-Lago, or how they got there in the first place. Trump was very secre­tive about the pack­ing of box­es that were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago last month, and did not let oth­er aides — includ­ing some of his most senior advis­ers — look at them, accord­ing to peo­ple close to him.

Dur­ing his time in the White House, Trump often took offi­cial doc­u­ments with him to his res­i­dence to review, accru­ing piles of records over time, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with Trump’s record-keep­ing prac­tices.

Although that is not in itself nec­es­sar­i­ly unusu­al, the doc­u­ments would pile up. One White House staffer said it became a prob­lem that even­tu­al­ly led records staff to search for mate­ri­als in clas­si­fied burn bags, which are used to dis­pose of doc­u­ments.

“For all the things writ­ten about him that he didn’t read, he often would take things with him to the res­i­dence or bring things down with him,” said a sec­ond Trump White House offi­cial. “But I don’t know that that is out of the ordi­nary.”

Offi­cials had to scram­ble to pack up before Joe Biden took office, and one per­son famil­iar with the events sur­mised that some of the doc­u­ments from the res­i­dence like­ly made their way into box­es des­tined for Mar-a-Lago rather than being turned over as they should have been. One advis­er said Trump began review­ing mate­ri­als in Decem­ber after staff received the requests from Gary Stern, a long­time Archives lawyer.

Over the sum­mer, the Archives reached out about high-pro­file doc­u­ments that did not seem to be among those turned over, a per­son famil­iar with the mat­ter said. Those includ­ed cor­re­spon­dence with North Kore­an leader Kim Jong Un that Trump once described as “love let­ters,” as well as a let­ter left for Trump by Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, the per­son said. The Nation­al Archives also inquired about a map of Hur­ri­cane Dori­an that had been altered with a black mark­er by Trump in a failed attempt to show he had not been wrong about the storm’s path, the per­son said.

Last month, Archives offi­cials retrieved those and the oth­er box­es, and the Archives said in a state­ment that Trump rep­re­sen­ta­tives were “con­tin­u­ing to search” for addi­tion­al records that have yet to be turned over.

David Lauf­man, a for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence offi­cial who was involved in pros­e­cu­tions and inves­ti­ga­tions over the mis­han­dling of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, said Trump being a for­mer pres­i­dent “presents addi­tion­al lit­i­ga­tion risk fac­tors, inso­far as he, as pres­i­dent, would have had the author­i­ty to declas­si­fy doc­u­ments or poten­tial­ly even deter­mine where clas­si­fied doc­u­ments could be trans­ferred.”

But, he added, “there’s no ques­tion that it was improp­er for clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion to be tak­en to or to reside at Mar-a-Lago.”

Lauf­man, who was involved in the inves­ti­ga­tion of Hillary Clinton’s use of a pri­vate email serv­er, said a Jus­tice Depart­ment inves­ti­ga­tion would focus not just on Trump but also on those who packed up the clas­si­fied mate­ri­als and moved them to Mar-a-Lago, and whether they knew what they were doing. He said the next step would be for the FBI to go to the secure facil­i­ty where the doc­u­ments were being stored, review the mark­ings for them­selves, and then “to broad­en its inves­ti­ga­tion to learn how these doc­u­ments came to be tak­en from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and whether any­body asso­ci­at­ed with that bears poten­tial crim­i­nal lia­bil­i­ty.”

For­mer pres­i­dents do some­times receive and hold on to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with pres­i­den­tial records. For exam­ple, for­mer pres­i­dents might receive clas­si­fied brief­ing doc­u­ments in advance of a meet­ing with a for­eign leader. But they are sup­posed to care­ful­ly safe­guard such doc­u­ments, keep­ing them in a safe or oth­er secure facil­i­ty.

If a record has been labeled “top secret,” fed­er­al rules spell out a pro­ce­dure for their han­dling and for any effort to declas­si­fy them. Often the infor­ma­tion does not orig­i­nate from the White House but from anoth­er agency.

In the past, when there has been dis­cus­sion of declas­si­fy­ing a mil­i­tary or intel­li­gence record, the orig­i­nat­ing agency is con­sult­ed about whether a doc­u­ment should be declas­si­fied. The rules also require that declas­si­fied doc­u­ments be marked vis­i­bly as “declas­si­fied.”

One added wrin­kle to the ques­tions swirling around the Trump records is that while he was pres­i­dent, Trump fre­quent­ly stayed at Mar-a-Lago and han­dled offi­cial doc­u­ments while there, mean­ing it could be dif­fi­cult in some instances to estab­lish the chain of cus­tody of spe­cif­ic clas­si­fied doc­u­ments.

The con­cern that the for­mer pres­i­dent or his inner cir­cle may have brought clas­si­fied doc­u­ments to an unse­cure loca­tion pro­vides a poten­tial line of polit­i­cal attack for crit­ics of Trump, who dur­ing the 2016 cam­paign repeat­ed­ly railed against Clin­ton for her han­dling of clas­si­fied mate­r­i­al and insist­ed she should be in jail. The FBI inves­ti­gat­ed Clin­ton for pos­si­bly mis­han­dling clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion in con­nec­tion with her use of a pri­vate email serv­er while she was sec­re­tary of state.

Inves­ti­ga­tors found 110 emails that con­tained clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion at the time they were sent or received in the group of 30,000 that Clin­ton lat­er turned over for review, includ­ing eight email chains that con­tained infor­ma­tion that was “top secret” at the time they were sent. But the Jus­tice Depart­ment ulti­mate­ly decid­ed not to charge Clin­ton, after the FBI deter­mined it could not prove she intend­ed to mis­han­dle sen­si­tive mate­r­i­al.

Some ana­lysts said Trump could now find him­self in the crosshairs of a sim­i­lar probe. But oth­ers urged cau­tion.

“There are just a ton of unknowns here,” Van Grack said. “So part of this is, peo­ple just need to not jump to con­clu­sions.”

———-

“Some Trump records tak­en to Mar-a-Lago clear­ly marked as clas­si­fied, includ­ing doc­u­ments at ‘top secret’ lev­el” by Jacque­line Ale­many, Devlin Bar­rett, Matt Zapo­to­sky and Josh Dawsey; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 02/10/2022

“Offi­cials had to scram­ble to pack up before Joe Biden took office, and one per­son famil­iar with the events sur­mised that some of the doc­u­ments from the res­i­dence like­ly made their way into box­es des­tined for Mar-a-Lago rather than being turned over as they should have been. One advis­er said Trump began review­ing mate­ri­als in Decem­ber after staff received the requests from Gary Stern, a long­time Archives lawyer.”

It was Decem­ber 2020 when Archives lawyer Gary Stern let the Trump admin­is­tra­tion know it had a respon­si­bil­i­ty to start review­ing mate­ri­als. How much review­ing did Trump actu­al­ly do dur­ing this peri­od? He could­n’t have had much time giv­en all the Jan 6 plot­ting he was up to. So when we learn that 15 box­es were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago back in Jan­u­ary and the FBI decid­ed to make this raid, that sug­gests the FBI had rea­son to believe there were quite a few clas­si­fied doc­u­ments that still weren’t turned over. What’s hid­ing in those doc­u­ments?

...
While it was unclear how many clas­si­fied doc­u­ments were among those received by the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion, some bore mark­ings that the infor­ma­tion was extreme­ly sen­si­tive and would be lim­it­ed to a small group of offi­cials with author­i­ty to view such high­ly clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, the two peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

The mark­ings were dis­cov­ered by the Nation­al Archives, which last month arranged for the col­lec­tion of 15 box­es of doc­u­ments from the for­mer president’s Mar-a-Lago res­i­dence. Archives offi­cials asked the Jus­tice Depart­ment to look into the mat­ter, though as of Thurs­day after­noon FBI agents had yet to review the mate­ri­als, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the request.

It remained unclear whether the Jus­tice Depart­ment would launch a full-fledged inves­ti­ga­tion. The files were being stored in a sen­si­tive com­part­ment­ed infor­ma­tion facil­i­ty, also known as an SCIF, while Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cials debat­ed how to pro­ceed, the two peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

...

Trump spokesman Tay­lor Budowich said: “It is clear that a nor­mal and rou­tine process is being weaponized by anony­mous, polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed gov­ern­ment sources to ped­dle Fake News. The only enti­ty with the abil­i­ty to cred­i­bly dis­pute this false report­ing, the Nation­al Archives, is pro­vid­ing no com­ment.”

Trump’s years-long defi­ance of the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act, which requires the preser­va­tion of mem­os, let­ters, notes, emails, fax­es and oth­er writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions relat­ed to a president’s offi­cial duties, and oth­er unusu­al record-keep­ing prac­tices have long drawn scruti­ny. In 2018, for exam­ple, Politi­co report­ed on his pen­chant for rip­ping up offi­cial doc­u­ments. But in recent weeks, Trump’s activ­i­ties have gen­er­at­ed new atten­tion — in large part because of the House select committee’s inves­ti­ga­tion of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capi­tol.
...

And then there’s the reports about torn apart and taped backed togeth­er doc­u­ments. Was that evi­dence of the attempt­ed destruc­tion of doc­u­ments part of what trig­gered this raid?

...
The Wash­ing­ton Post report­ed late last month that some of the White House records the Nation­al Archives turned over to the com­mit­tee appeared to have been torn apart and then taped back togeth­er. The Post lat­er report­ed that offi­cials had recov­ered 15 box­es of pres­i­den­tial records from Mar-a-Lago, and that they sus­pect­ed Trump had pos­si­bly vio­lat­ed laws con­cern­ing the han­dling of gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments — includ­ing those that might be con­sid­ered clas­si­fied.
...

And then we get the warn­ing that Trump him­self may not be the only per­son of inter­est here. Some­one packed up and trans­port­ed all of these doc­u­ments from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. Who did this and were they aware of it at the time? It’s the kind of ques­tion that is extra inter­est­ing when we learn that Trump was report­ed­ly very secre­tive about those 15 box­es that were retrieved back in Jan­u­ary, includ­ing with some of his most senior advis­ers. It’s the kind of detail that sug­gests any­one who did indeed know about those box­es could be crim­i­nal­ly liable in this case:

...
It is not pre­cise­ly clear who packed up the clas­si­fied mate­ri­als at Mar-a-Lago, or how they got there in the first place. Trump was very secre­tive about the pack­ing of box­es that were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago last month, and did not let oth­er aides — includ­ing some of his most senior advis­ers — look at them, accord­ing to peo­ple close to him.

Dur­ing his time in the White House, Trump often took offi­cial doc­u­ments with him to his res­i­dence to review, accru­ing piles of records over time, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with Trump’s record-keep­ing prac­tices.

Although that is not in itself nec­es­sar­i­ly unusu­al, the doc­u­ments would pile up. One White House staffer said it became a prob­lem that even­tu­al­ly led records staff to search for mate­ri­als in clas­si­fied burn bags, which are used to dis­pose of doc­u­ments.

“For all the things writ­ten about him that he didn’t read, he often would take things with him to the res­i­dence or bring things down with him,” said a sec­ond Trump White House offi­cial. “But I don’t know that that is out of the ordi­nary.”

...

David Lauf­man, a for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence offi­cial who was involved in pros­e­cu­tions and inves­ti­ga­tions over the mis­han­dling of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, said Trump being a for­mer pres­i­dent “presents addi­tion­al lit­i­ga­tion risk fac­tors, inso­far as he, as pres­i­dent, would have had the author­i­ty to declas­si­fy doc­u­ments or poten­tial­ly even deter­mine where clas­si­fied doc­u­ments could be trans­ferred.”

But, he added, “there’s no ques­tion that it was improp­er for clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion to be tak­en to or to reside at Mar-a-Lago.”

Lauf­man, who was involved in the inves­ti­ga­tion of Hillary Clinton’s use of a pri­vate email serv­er, said a Jus­tice Depart­ment inves­ti­ga­tion would focus not just on Trump but also on those who packed up the clas­si­fied mate­ri­als and moved them to Mar-a-Lago, and whether they knew what they were doing. He said the next step would be for the FBI to go to the secure facil­i­ty where the doc­u­ments were being stored, review the mark­ings for them­selves, and then “to broad­en its inves­ti­ga­tion to learn how these doc­u­ments came to be tak­en from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and whether any­body asso­ci­at­ed with that bears poten­tial crim­i­nal lia­bil­i­ty.”
...

Who else was aware of the con­tents of these box­es? It’s a pret­ty big ques­tion in this case. It would obvi­ous­ly be a huge deal if Trump was shar­ing access to this con­tents with shady fig­ures. And yet Trump was appar­ent­ly quite secre­tive about them. So who else got that insid­er knowl­edge? Mike Pence? Jared Kush­n­er? Ivan­ka? How about Steve Ban­non or Roger Stone? Who was Trump shar­ing his clas­si­fied trea­sure trove with? Hope­ful­ly we’ll learn these details at some point. Ide­al­ly before the idi­ot­ic civ­il war fought to pro­tect the hon­or of a lunatic seem­ing­ly inca­pable of car­ry­ing out his basic duties.

@Pterrafractyl–

An inter­est­ing added dimen­sion to this is the fact that the judge who autho­rized the FBI raid was pre­vi­ous­ly the attor­ney for–drumroll, fanfare–Jeffrey Epstein.

“Clas­si­fied” indeed!

Keep up the Great Work!

Best,

Dave

@Dave: We’re get­ting more infor­ma­tion on the nature of the intel­li­gence that trig­gered the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago. Accord­ing to the fol­low­ing report by Bill Arkin, based on anony­mous gov­ern­ment sources, the raid was pre­cip­i­tat­ed by a con­fi­den­tial source who was able to iden­ti­fy what clas­si­fied doc­u­ments Don­ald Trump was still in pos­ses­sion of and the loca­tions of those doc­u­ments. It sounds like that was the basis for the intru­sion into one of Trump’s safes. So some­one who knew about clas­si­fied doc­u­ments Trump was stor­ing in a safe informed the FBI. Recall how we were told in pre­vi­ous reports that Trump was high­ly secre­tive about the exis­tence of this trove of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments, even hid­ing their exis­tence from senior aides. So who­ev­er act­ed as the source for this raid was in an unusu­al posi­tion inside Trump’s inner cir­cle. That’s part of what makes this sto­ry such a cri­sis for Trump: some­one very close to him is talk­ing to the feds.

Accord­ing to Ark­in’s sources, it sounds like the clas­si­fied mate­ri­als Trump was believed to still be hold­ing includ­ed clas­si­fied “nation­al defense infor­ma­tion” and retriev­ing those doc­u­ments was the basis for the raid. What type of nation­al defense infor­ma­tion was so inter­est­ing to Trump that he risk this kind of legal action to hold onto it?

Amus­ing­ly, Trump is assert­ing that the entire affair is a result of a mov­ing mix­up. Some box­es were acci­den­tal­ly moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago dur­ing the tran­si­tion process and that was it. It was just an inno­cent mis­take. And that would have been a some­what plau­si­ble expla­na­tion had Trump returned all of the box­es of clas­si­fied mate­ri­als back in Jan­u­ary when the Nation­al Archives request­ed them. 15 box­es were indeed returned, but it sounds like 10–15 were kept.

And what else was in those box­es that Trump so desired that he risk break­ing fed­er­al archives laws to hold onto them? What it all nation­al secu­ri­ty relat­ed? That’s the big meta-mys­tery here, which makes the fact that it was one of Jef­frey Epstein’s for­mer defense attor­neys, Judge Bruce Rein­hart, who end­ed up ulti­mate­ly sign­ing off on the FBI raid. As we’re going to see in the sec­ond arti­cle below, Rein­hart was­n’t just one of Epstein’s defense attor­neys. He was a par­tic­u­lar­ly con­tro­ver­sial defense attor­ney because he worked as a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor until Jan 1, 2008, and then joined Epstein’s defense team the next day. It’s not a great look. Recall how Steve Ban­non appar­ent­ly thought Epstein was a spy. If so, any Epstein-relat­ed mate­ri­als Trump may have decid­ed to take could indeed be seen a nation­al secu­ri­ty threat. We have no direct evi­dence that any of this sto­ry involves Epstein-relat­ed doc­u­ments, but it’s hard to ignore the ques­tion when it’s Rein­hart who signed off on the raid.

So it sounds like Trump’s legal per­ils could just be get­ting start­ed with these clas­si­fied doc­u­ments, and while Trump does­n’t appear to have a good expla­na­tion, he does have a viable dis­trac­tion in the form of Judge Rei­hart’s Epstein ties. Except those ties aren’t actu­al­ly that great a dis­trac­tion giv­en Trump’s own exten­sive Epstein ties. That’s part of what going to be inter­est­ing to see as this plays out: fix­at­ing on Judge Rein­hart’s Epstein ties is kind of a dou­ble-edged sword for Trump. And yet the more under­ly­ing facts on the case that comes out, the worse it looks for Trump includ­ing a pos­si­ble close insid­er already coop­er­at­ing with the feds. So he’s going to need a dis­trac­tion in some form or anoth­er:

Newsweek

Exclu­sive: An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hid­ing, and Where

By William M. Arkin On 8/10/22 at 10:03 AM EDT

The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based large­ly on infor­ma­tion from an FBI con­fi­den­tial human source, one who was able to iden­ti­fy what clas­si­fied doc­u­ments for­mer Pres­i­dent Trump was still hid­ing and even the loca­tion of those doc­u­ments, two senior gov­ern­ment offi­cials told Newsweek.

The offi­cials, who have direct knowl­edge of the FBI’s delib­er­a­tions and were grant­ed anonymi­ty in order to dis­cuss sen­si­tive mat­ters, said the raid of Don­ald Trump’s Flori­da res­i­dence was delib­er­ate­ly timed to occur when the for­mer pres­i­dent was away.

FBI deci­sion-mak­ers in Wash­ing­ton and Mia­mi thought that deny­ing the for­mer pres­i­dent a pho­to oppor­tu­ni­ty or a plat­form from which to grand­stand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would low­er the pro­file of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial who is a 30-year vet­er­an of the FBI.

The effort to keep the raid low-key failed: instead, it prompt­ed a furi­ous response from GOP lead­ers and Trump sup­port­ers. “What a spec­tac­u­lar back­fire,” says the Jus­tice offi­cial.

“I know that there is much spec­u­la­tion out there that this is polit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion, but it is real­ly the best and the worst of the bureau­cra­cy in action,” the offi­cial says. “They want­ed to punc­tu­ate the fact that this was a rou­tine law enforce­ment action, stripped of any polit­i­cal over­tones, and yet [they] got exact­ly the oppo­site.”

Both senior gov­ern­ment offi­cials say the raid was sched­uled with no polit­i­cal motive, the FBI sole­ly intent on recov­er­ing high­ly clas­si­fied doc­u­ments that were ille­gal­ly removed from the White House. Prepa­ra­tions to con­duct such an oper­a­tion began weeks ago, but in plan­ning the date and time, the FBI Mia­mi Field Office and Wash­ing­ton head­quar­ters were focused on the for­mer pres­i­den­t’s sched­uled return to Flori­da from his res­i­dences in New York and New Jer­sey.

“They were seek­ing to avoid any media cir­cus,” says the sec­ond source, a senior intel­li­gence offi­cial who was briefed on the inves­ti­ga­tion and the oper­a­tion. “So even though every­thing made sense bureau­crat­i­cal­ly and the FBI feared that the doc­u­ments might be destroyed, they also cre­at­ed the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignor­ing the fall­out.”

On Mon­day at about 10 a.m. EST, two dozen FBI agents and tech­ni­cians showed up at Don­ald Trump’s Flori­da home to exe­cute a search war­rant to obtain any gov­ern­ment-owned doc­u­ments that might be in the pos­ses­sion of Trump but are required to be deliv­ered to the Archives under the pro­vi­sions of the 1978 Pres­i­den­tial Records Act. (In response to the Hillary Clin­ton email scan­dal, Trump him­self signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain clas­si­fied doc­u­ments.)

The act estab­lish­es that pres­i­den­tial records are the prop­er­ty of the U.S. gov­ern­ment and not a pres­i­den­t’s pri­vate prop­er­ty. Put in place after Water­gate to avoid the abus­es of the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion, the law impos­es strict penal­ties for fail­ure to com­ply. “Who­ev­er, hav­ing the cus­tody of any such record, pro­ceed­ing, map, book, doc­u­ment, paper, or oth­er thing, will­ful­ly and unlaw­ful­ly con­ceals, removes, muti­lates, oblit­er­ates, fal­si­fies, or destroys the same, shall be fined” $2,000, up to three years in prison or “shall for­feit his office and be dis­qual­i­fied from hold­ing any office under the Unit­ed States.”

The act, and con­cerns about the ille­gal pos­ses­sion of clas­si­fied “nation­al defense infor­ma­tion” are the bases for the search war­rant, accord­ing to the two sources. The raid had noth­ing to do with the Jan­u­ary 6 inves­ti­ga­tion or any oth­er alleged wrong­do­ing by the for­mer pres­i­dent.

The road to the raid began a year-and-a-half ago, when in the tran­si­tion from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to that of Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, there were imme­di­ate ques­tions raised by the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion (NARA) as to whether the pres­i­den­tial records turned over to the fed­er­al agency for his­tor­i­cal preser­va­tion were com­plete or not.

In Feb­ru­ary, Archivist David Fer­riero tes­ti­fied before Con­gress that his agency began talk­ing with Trump’s peo­ple right after they left office and that the Trump camp had already returned 15 box­es of doc­u­ments to the Archives. Fer­riero said that in those mate­ri­als, the Archives dis­cov­ered items “marked as clas­si­fied nation­al secu­ri­ty infor­ma­tion,” unleash­ing fur­ther inquiries as to whether Trump con­tin­ued to pos­sess clas­si­fied mate­r­i­al.

The basic out­lines of the facts sur­round­ing this time­line have been con­firmed by the for­mer pres­i­dent. He has pre­vi­ous­ly said that he was return­ing any offi­cial records to the Archives, label­ing any con­fu­sion in the mat­ter as “an ordi­nary and rou­tine process to ensure the preser­va­tion of my lega­cy and in accor­dance with the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act.” He also claimed the Archives “did not ‘find’ any­thing” in what he had already been returned, sug­gest­ing that there was noth­ing sen­si­tive. He said the doc­u­ments had inad­ver­tent­ly shipped to Flori­da dur­ing the six-hour tran­si­tion peri­od in which his belong­ings were moved.

Accord­ing to the Jus­tice Depart­ment source, the Archives saw things dif­fer­ent­ly, believ­ing that the for­mer White House was stonewalling and con­tin­ued to pos­sess unau­tho­rized mate­r­i­al. Ear­li­er this year, they asked the Jus­tice Depart­ment to inves­ti­gate.

In late April, the source says, a fed­er­al grand jury began delib­er­at­ing whether there was a vio­la­tion of the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act or whether Pres­i­dent Trump unlaw­ful­ly pos­sessed nation­al secu­ri­ty infor­ma­tion. Through the grand jury process, the Nation­al Archives pro­vid­ed fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors with copies of the doc­u­ments received from for­mer Pres­i­dent Trump in Jan­u­ary 2022. The grand jury con­clud­ed that there had been a vio­la­tion of the law, accord­ing to the Jus­tice Depart­ment source.

In the past week, the pros­e­cu­tor in the case and local Assis­tant U.S. Attor­ney went to Flori­da mag­is­trate Judge Bruce Rein­hart in West Palm Beach to seek approval for the search of Don­ald Trump’s pri­vate res­i­dence. The affi­davit to obtain the search war­rant, the intel­li­gence source says, con­tained abun­dant and per­sua­sive detail that Trump con­tin­ued to pos­sess the rel­e­vant records in vio­la­tion of fed­er­al law, and that inves­ti­ga­tors had suf­fi­cient infor­ma­tion to prove that those records were locat­ed at Mar-a-Lago—includ­ing the detail that they were con­tained in a spe­cif­ic safe in a spe­cif­ic room.

“In order for the inves­ti­ga­tors to con­vince the Flori­da judge to approve such an unprece­dent­ed raid, the infor­ma­tion had to be sol­id, which the FBI claimed,” says the intel­li­gence source.

Accord­ing to experts famil­iar with FBI prac­tices, Judge Rein­hart reviewed the pros­e­cu­tor’s evi­dence and asked numer­ous ques­tions about the sources and the urgency. The judge signed a search war­rant allow­ing the FBI to look for rel­e­vant mate­r­i­al and the FBI then planned the oper­a­tion, want­i­ng to con­duct the raid while Trump was spend­ing time at his golf club in Bed­min­ster, New Jer­sey. A Secret Ser­vice source who spoke on back­ground said the Secret Ser­vice direc­tor was giv­en advance warn­ing and was lat­er told the specifics of the raid.

Because the Secret Ser­vice is still respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing the for­mer pres­i­dent, his fam­i­ly, and his prop­er­ty, the FBI had to coor­di­nate with the Secret Ser­vice to gain access to the grounds.

A con­voy of unmarked black SUVs and a Ryder rental truck filled with about three dozen FBI spe­cial agents and tech­ni­cians entered the gates in the ear­ly evening. Heav­i­ly armed Secret Ser­vice agents were also vis­i­bly present at the gates. The Palm Beach Police Depart­ment was also present at the scene.

The entire oper­a­tion was con­duct­ed rel­a­tive­ly stealth­ily. No FBI peo­ple were seen in their icon­ic blue wind­break­ers announc­ing the pres­ence of the Bureau. And though local law enforce­ment was present, the Palm Beach Police Depart­ment was care­ful to tweet on Tues­day that it “was not aware of the exis­tence of a search war­rant nor did our depart­ment assist the FBI in the exe­cu­tion of a search war­rant.”

Accord­ing to news reports, some 10–15 box­es of doc­u­ments were removed from the premis­es. Don­ald Trump said in a state­ment that the FBI opened his per­son­al safe as part of their search. Trump attor­ney Lind­sey Hal­li­gan, who was present dur­ing the mul­ti-hour search, says that the FBI tar­get­ed three rooms—a bed­room, an office and a stor­age room. That sug­gests that the FBI knew specif­i­cal­ly where to look.

...

The Biden White House says the pres­i­dent was not briefed about the Mar-a-Lago raid and knew noth­ing about it in advance. “The Jus­tice Depart­ment con­ducts inves­ti­ga­tions inde­pen­dent­ly and we leave any law enforce­ment mat­ters to them,” Press Sec­re­tary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tues­day after­noon. “It would not be appro­pri­ate for us to com­ment on any ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tions.”

The senior Jus­tice Depart­ment source says that Gar­land was reg­u­lar­ly briefed on the Records Act inves­ti­ga­tion, and that he knew about the grand jury and what mate­r­i­al fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors were seek­ing. He insists, though, that Gar­land had no pri­or knowl­edge of the date and time of the spe­cif­ic raid, nor was he asked to approve it. “I know it’s hard for peo­ple to believe,” says the offi­cial, “but this was a mat­ter for the U.S. Attor­ney and the FBI.”

FBI direc­tor Christo­pher Wray ulti­mate­ly gave his go-ahead to con­duct the raid, the senior Jus­tice offi­cial says. “It real­ly is a case of the Bureau mis­read­ing the impact.”

————-

“Exclu­sive: An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hid­ing, and Where” by William M. Arkin; Newsweek; 8/10/2022

“On Mon­day at about 10 a.m. EST, two dozen FBI agents and tech­ni­cians showed up at Don­ald Trump’s Flori­da home to exe­cute a search war­rant to obtain any gov­ern­ment-owned doc­u­ments that might be in the pos­ses­sion of Trump but are required to be deliv­ered to the Archives under the pro­vi­sions of the 1978 Pres­i­den­tial Records Act. (In response to the Hillary Clin­ton email scan­dal, Trump him­self signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain clas­si­fied doc­u­ments.)”

Trump him­self signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain clas­si­fied doc­u­ments. Ouch. But it appears the removal — and retain­ing of — clas­si­fied doc­u­ments is the basis for the FBI’s action under the 1978 Pres­i­den­tial Records Act that was orig­i­nal­ly put in place to avoid a repeat of the abus­es of the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. But it’s not just the theft of “clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion” that trig­gered this raid. It was specif­i­cal­ly the ille­gal pos­ses­sion of clas­si­fied “nation­al defense infor­ma­tion”, which was appar­ent­ly dis­cov­ered after the Archives exam­ined the con­tents of the 15 box­es of clas­si­fied mate­ri­als that Trump had returned back in Jan­u­ary. So some­thing about the con­tents of those 15 returned box­es tipped them off to the exis­tence of more clas­si­fied mate­ri­als still be with­held. Clas­si­fied mate­ri­als con­tain­ing “nation­al defense infor­ma­tion.” What kind of “nation­al defense infor­ma­tion” would be of such inter­est to Trump that he would first take it from the White House improp­er­ly and then appar­ent­ly try to keep it even after the Nation­al Archives con­tact­ed him about all the miss­ing doc­u­ments? That’s just one of the big ques­tions loom­ing over this sto­ry:

...
The act estab­lish­es that pres­i­den­tial records are the prop­er­ty of the U.S. gov­ern­ment and not a pres­i­den­t’s pri­vate prop­er­ty. Put in place after Water­gate to avoid the abus­es of the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion, the law impos­es strict penal­ties for fail­ure to com­ply. “Who­ev­er, hav­ing the cus­tody of any such record, pro­ceed­ing, map, book, doc­u­ment, paper, or oth­er thing, will­ful­ly and unlaw­ful­ly con­ceals, removes, muti­lates, oblit­er­ates, fal­si­fies, or destroys the same, shall be fined” $2,000, up to three years in prison or “shall for­feit his office and be dis­qual­i­fied from hold­ing any office under the Unit­ed States.”

The act, and con­cerns about the ille­gal pos­ses­sion of clas­si­fied “nation­al defense infor­ma­tion” are the bases for the search war­rant, accord­ing to the two sources. The raid had noth­ing to do with the Jan­u­ary 6 inves­ti­ga­tion or any oth­er alleged wrong­do­ing by the for­mer pres­i­dent.

The road to the raid began a year-and-a-half ago, when in the tran­si­tion from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to that of Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, there were imme­di­ate ques­tions raised by the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion (NARA) as to whether the pres­i­den­tial records turned over to the fed­er­al agency for his­tor­i­cal preser­va­tion were com­plete or not.

In Feb­ru­ary, Archivist David Fer­riero tes­ti­fied before Con­gress that his agency began talk­ing with Trump’s peo­ple right after they left office and that the Trump camp had already returned 15 box­es of doc­u­ments to the Archives. Fer­riero said that in those mate­ri­als, the Archives dis­cov­ered items “marked as clas­si­fied nation­al secu­ri­ty infor­ma­tion,” unleash­ing fur­ther inquiries as to whether Trump con­tin­ued to pos­sess clas­si­fied mate­r­i­al.

...

Accord­ing to news reports, some 10–15 box­es of doc­u­ments were removed from the premis­es. Don­ald Trump said in a state­ment that the FBI opened his per­son­al safe as part of their search. Trump attor­ney Lind­sey Hal­li­gan, who was present dur­ing the mul­ti-hour search, says that the FBI tar­get­ed three rooms—a bed­room, an office and a stor­age room. That sug­gests that the FBI knew specif­i­cal­ly where to look.
...

And note the utter­ly implau­si­ble expla­na­tion from Trump for how he got all those box­es in the first place: it was a all just a mov­ing mix-up. Now, that might be a qua­si-plau­si­ble expla­na­tion had Trump actu­al­ly returned all the box­es back in Jan­u­ary and not con­tin­ued to with­hold so much. But that’s obvi­ous­ly not the case:

...
The basic out­lines of the facts sur­round­ing this time­line have been con­firmed by the for­mer pres­i­dent. He has pre­vi­ous­ly said that he was return­ing any offi­cial records to the Archives, label­ing any con­fu­sion in the mat­ter as “an ordi­nary and rou­tine process to ensure the preser­va­tion of my lega­cy and in accor­dance with the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act.” He also claimed the Archives “did not ‘find’ any­thing” in what he had already been returned, sug­gest­ing that there was noth­ing sen­si­tive. He said the doc­u­ments had inad­ver­tent­ly shipped to Flori­da dur­ing the six-hour tran­si­tion peri­od in which his belong­ings were moved.

Accord­ing to the Jus­tice Depart­ment source, the Archives saw things dif­fer­ent­ly, believ­ing that the for­mer White House was stonewalling and con­tin­ued to pos­sess unau­tho­rized mate­r­i­al. Ear­li­er this year, they asked the Jus­tice Depart­ment to inves­ti­gate.
...

Then, in late April, a fed­er­al grand jury began delib­er­at­ing, cul­mi­nat­ing in the sig­noff on the raid by Flori­da mag­is­trate Judge Bruce Rein­hart in West Palm Beach. And yes, this same judge end­ed up work­ing on Jef­frey Epstein’s defense case, which is one of those fun fact that just makes this whole sto­ry appear all the more sor­did. It’s also the kind of fun fact that rais­es the ques­tion: Did Trump take any clas­si­fied doc­u­ments relat­ed to Jef­frey Epstein? It sure seems like the kind of top­ic he would have a keen inter­est in.

But also note how the infor­ma­tion the grand jury was work­ing off of in approv­ing this raid includ­ed details that mate­ri­als would be found in a spe­cif­ic safe in a spe­cif­ic room. Recall the ear­li­er report­ing indi­cat­ing that he was being high­ly secre­tive about the exis­tence of these clas­si­fied mate­ri­als even to senior advis­ers. So the list of peo­ple who had insid­er knowl­edge on the loca­tions of these mate­ri­als could­n’t be a long list. Who was the fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors’ source for this? It’s the kind of ques­tion that could tie into all sorts of oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions involv­ing Trump:

...
In late April, the source says, a fed­er­al grand jury began delib­er­at­ing whether there was a vio­la­tion of the Pres­i­den­tial Records Act or whether Pres­i­dent Trump unlaw­ful­ly pos­sessed nation­al secu­ri­ty infor­ma­tion. Through the grand jury process, the Nation­al Archives pro­vid­ed fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors with copies of the doc­u­ments received from for­mer Pres­i­dent Trump in Jan­u­ary 2022. The grand jury con­clud­ed that there had been a vio­la­tion of the law, accord­ing to the Jus­tice Depart­ment source.

In the past week, the pros­e­cu­tor in the case and local Assis­tant U.S. Attor­ney went to Flori­da mag­is­trate Judge Bruce Rein­hart in West Palm Beach to seek approval for the search of Don­ald Trump’s pri­vate res­i­dence. The affi­davit to obtain the search war­rant, the intel­li­gence source says, con­tained abun­dant and per­sua­sive detail that Trump con­tin­ued to pos­sess the rel­e­vant records in vio­la­tion of fed­er­al law, and that inves­ti­ga­tors had suf­fi­cient infor­ma­tion to prove that those records were locat­ed at Mar-a-Lago—includ­ing the detail that they were con­tained in a spe­cif­ic safe in a spe­cif­ic room.
...

Now, regard­ing the fun fact about Judge Rein­hart hav­ing served on Jef­frey Epstein’s defense team, note that the con­tro­ver­sy isn’t just that he ser­viced as one of Epstein’s defense attor­neys. It turns out Rein­hart was work­ing at a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor until resign­ing on Jan 1, 2008. He joined Epstein’s defense team the next day:

Politi­co

Judge who approved FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search rep­re­sent­ed clients linked to Jef­frey Epstein

Bruce Rein­hart worked as a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor until Jan. 1, 2008, when a day lat­er he became a defense attor­ney rep­re­sent­ing employ­ees of Epstein.

By Gary Fine­out
08/09/2022 09:41 PM EDT

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The fed­er­al mag­is­trate judge who signed off on the war­rant that allowed fed­er­al agents to search for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Flori­da res­i­dence once drew scruti­ny for switch­ing from his job as a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor to work­ing as a defense attor­ney on behalf of indi­vid­u­als con­nect­ed to con­vict­ed sex offend­er Jef­frey Epstein.

The judge, known for his “metic­u­lous” nature, is also well-respect­ed with­in the Palm Beach legal com­mu­ni­ty and had once worked in the Jus­tice Department’s pub­lic integri­ty sec­tion. He had con­tributed to both Demo­c­rat and Repub­li­can can­di­dates.

Trump lawyer Christi­na Bobb told POLITICO that mag­is­trate judge Bruce Rein­hart signed off on the war­rant and that agents removed about a dozen box­es of mate­ri­als from the prop­er­ty. Bobb was said to be present at the time the FBI con­duct­ed the search of Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach.

Reinhart’s deci­sion to grant the FBI’s war­rant request to search Trump’s resort has sparked a firestorm among Repub­li­cans, who have decried what they call the “weaponiza­tion” of the Depart­ment of Jus­tice.

But one local pros­e­cu­tor described Rein­hart — who has been a mag­is­trate judge since 2018 — as “well respect­ed” with­in the Palm Beach Coun­ty legal com­mu­ni­ty. Rein­hart is mar­ried to Cir­cuit Judge Car­olyn Bell, a for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor who was appoint­ed to the bench by then-Gov. Rick Scott, a Repub­li­can who is now a sen­a­tor.

“He’s a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor and a defense attor­ney and he’s also known for being metic­u­lous,” said Palm Beach Coun­ty State Attor­ney Dave Aron­berg, a Demo­c­rat was who elect­ed state attor­ney but who also once worked for Repub­li­can Attor­ney Gen­er­al Pam Bon­di.

“He’s not going to make a snap judg­ment,” Aron­berg added.

...

Mag­is­trate judges are not appoint­ed by the pres­i­dent but instead are appoint­ed by dis­trict judges. Their duties can include deal­ing with bond hear­ings, han­dling tech­ni­cal issues in civ­il cas­es and sign­ing off on whether to autho­rize a search war­rant.

Rein­hart, who earned his law degree from Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia and also grad­u­at­ed from Prince­ton, worked for the Trea­sury Depart­ment, the pub­lic integri­ty sec­tion of the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice, and spent more than 11 years as an assis­tant Unit­ed States attor­ney. Dur­ing that time he han­dled more than 100 grand jury inves­ti­ga­tions includ­ing cas­es involv­ing health care fraud, pub­lic cor­rup­tion and tax fraud, accord­ing to a biog­ra­phy of Rein­hart post­ed by the pri­vate law firm where he worked for about six years. His offi­cial bio on the U.S. Dis­trict Court South­ern Dis­trict of Flori­da site appeared to be deac­ti­vat­ed.

He worked as a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor until Jan. 1, 2008, when a day lat­er he became a defense attor­ney rep­re­sent­ing employ­ees of Epstein, accord­ing to a 2018 sto­ry by the Mia­mi Her­ald. Accord­ing to the Her­ald, the employ­ees includ­ed pilots for Epstein, his sched­uler and a woman who had been described by some of Epstein’s vic­tims as his sex slave. Epstein com­mit­ted sui­cide in a Man­hat­tan fed­er­al jail in 2019 while await­ing tri­al for sex traf­fick­ing.

The Her­ald also report­ed that in 2011, Rein­hart was named in a law­suit where he was accused of vio­lat­ing Jus­tice Depart­ment poli­cies by rep­re­sent­ing the employ­ees. Rein­hart denied the alle­ga­tions and said he did not par­tic­i­pate in Epstein’s crim­i­nal case and did not learn any con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion while work­ing as a pros­e­cu­tor.

...

————

“Judge who approved FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search rep­re­sent­ed clients linked to Jef­frey Epstein” by Gary Fine­out; Politi­co; 08/09/2022

“But one local pros­e­cu­tor described Rein­hart — who has been a mag­is­trate judge since 2018 — as “well respect­ed” with­in the Palm Beach Coun­ty legal com­mu­ni­ty. Rein­hart is mar­ried to Cir­cuit Judge Car­olyn Bell, a for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor who was appoint­ed to the bench by then-Gov. Rick Scott, a Repub­li­can who is now a sen­a­tor.”

As the arti­cle describes, Judge Rei­hert has a his­to­ry of bipar­ti­san dona­tions and does­n’t have the rep­u­ta­tion for being a par­ti­san hack. But that’s not the part of his back­ground that observers are tak­ing note of. It’s the fact that Rein­hart worked as a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor until Jan 1, 2008, and joined Jef­frey Epstein’s defense team the next day. It’s the kind of ques­tion­able tim­ing that result­ed in a law­suit accus­ing Rein­hart of vio­lat­ing DOJ poli­cies:

...
He worked as a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor until Jan. 1, 2008, when a day lat­er he became a defense attor­ney rep­re­sent­ing employ­ees of Epstein, accord­ing to a 2018 sto­ry by the Mia­mi Her­ald. Accord­ing to the Her­ald, the employ­ees includ­ed pilots for Epstein, his sched­uler and a woman who had been described by some of Epstein’s vic­tims as his sex slave. Epstein com­mit­ted sui­cide in a Man­hat­tan fed­er­al jail in 2019 while await­ing tri­al for sex traf­fick­ing.

The Her­ald also report­ed that in 2011, Rein­hart was named in a law­suit where he was accused of vio­lat­ing Jus­tice Depart­ment poli­cies by rep­re­sent­ing the employ­ees. Rein­hart denied the alle­ga­tions and said he did not par­tic­i­pate in Epstein’s crim­i­nal case and did not learn any con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion while work­ing as a pros­e­cu­tor.
...

So at this point, based on the avail­able evi­dence, it’s not clear how Rein­hart’s past defense of Epstein could have played a role in the deci­sion to approve this raid. But it sure rais­es all sorts of grim­ly fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tions. Like the gen­er­al ques­tion of just what doc­u­ments was Trump allowed to see about what the gov­ern­ment knew about Epstein’s oper­a­tions? Along with ques­tions about what those doc­u­ments may have said about Trump’s per­son­al involve­ment in those oper­a­tions. As well as the gen­er­al ques­tion of what exact­ly Trump decid­ed to do with those clas­si­fied doc­u­ments after read­ing them.