‘You know a nation is in trouble when its security services are raiding the residence of a former president’

Banana Republic U.S.A.

The Mar-a-Lago raid is a dangerous moment for America

by Tom Slater, Spiked, August 11, 2022

You know a nation is in trouble when its security services are raiding the residence of a former president. Doubly so when said nation’s supposedly liberal intelligentsia seem tickled pink about this unprecedented development, without a whiff of concern or scepticism about what the feds are up to. That’s where the United States is at the moment, in the wake of the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump ’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Monday, reportedly over a dispute about missing official documents.

There’s still much we don’t know about this bizarrely explosive dispute between Trump and the National Archives. But what we do know is puzzling, to put it lightly. According to the New York Times, officials had been after Trump for months over official and potentially classified materials he still had in his possession. After archivists retrieved 15 boxes of documents, including some sensitive material, the US Department of Justice was called in. A grand jury was convened. Federal investigators, including counterintelligence officers, were deployed. And, unsatisfied with what had been retrieved, officers then secured a search warrant.

Why this couldn’t have been handled in a somewhat more discrete fashion, without armed agents and everything, is not yet clear. Think back to Hillary Clinton’s notorious email server and you see allegations like this are not unprecedented, but this raid certainly is. Former spooks on liberal cable-news networks have reassured Americans that everything must have been on the up and up, because the raid would have required the sign-off of a judge, FBI head Christopher Wray and attorney general Merrick Garland. ‘They wouldn’t do this unless they had the goods’ is the line being trotted out across corporate media.

To at least half of America, of course, this is about as reassuring as Joe Biden insisting he remembers where he parked the car. As left-wing journalist Matt Taibbi notes, similar reassurances were offered over and over again during the ludicrous Russiagate scandal, to justify official investigations, insane claims and even the surveillance of Trump advisers. In the end, of course, the idea that Trump was Putin’s puppet turned out to be an elite conspiracy theory. Still, the FBI and its newfound liberal cheerleaders are now hoping to rely on a level of blind public trust that no longer exists, if it ever existed at all….

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