He had no right to take them, and he had a legal obligation to return them. All of them.
WaPo: (pay wall)
Mar-a-Lago search appears focused on whether Trump, aides withheld items
A lawyer for Donald Trump said agents seized about a dozen boxes on Monday, months after 15 boxes of items were returned
In the months before the FBI’s dramatic move to execute a search warrant at former president Donald Trump’s Florida home and open his safe to look for items, federal authorities grew increasingly concerned that Trump or his lawyers and aides had not, in fact, returned all the documents and other material that were government property, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Officials became suspicious that when Trump gave 15 boxes of items to the National Archives about seven months ago, either the former president or people close to him held on to key records — despite a Justice Department investigation into the handling of classified and other material that had been sent to the former president’s private club and residence in the waning days of his administration.
Over months of discussions about whether documents were still missing, some officials also came to suspect Trump’s representatives were not truthful at times, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
On Tuesday, a lawyer for Trump said the agents who brought the court-approved warrant to Mar-a-Lago a day earlier took about 12 more boxes after conducting their search.
People familiar with the investigation said that Justice Department and FBI officials traveled to Mar-a-Lago this spring, a meeting first reported by CNN. The officials spoke to Trump’s representatives, inspected the storage space where documents were held, and expressed concern that the former president or people close to him still had items that should be in government custody, these people said.
By that point, officials at the National Archives had been aggressively contacting people in Trump’s orbit to demand the return of documents they believed were covered by the Presidential Records Act, said two people familiar with those inquiries. Like the others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigation.
Christina Bobb, a lawyer for Trump, said his lawyers engaged in discussions with the Justice Department this spring over materials held at Mar-a-Lago. At that time, the former president’s legal team searched through two to three dozen boxes in a storage area, hunting for documents that could be considered presidential records, and turned over several items that might meet the definition, she said.
In June, Bobb said, she and Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran met with Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section at the Justice Department, along with several investigators. Trump stopped by the meeting as it began, to greet the investigators, but was not interviewed. The lawyers showed the federal officials the boxes, and Bratt and the others spent some time looking through the material.
Bobb said the Justice Department officials commented that they did not believe the storage unit was properly secured, so Trump officials added a lock to the facility. When FBI agents searched the property Monday, Bobb added, they broke through the lock that had been added to the door.
The FBI removed about a dozen boxes that had been stored in the basement storage area, she said.
Bobb did not share the search warrant left by agents, but said that it indicated agents were investigating possible violations of laws dealing with the handling of classified material and the Presidential Records Act.
Trump aides also declined to share the search warrant with The Washington Post.
Cue the nutballs - and bring on the Keyboard Kommandos.
The Atlantic: (pay wall)
The Bad and Good News About Trump’s Violent Supporters
The FBI search at Mar-a-Lago prompts sincere talk of violence. But some threats remain mere threats.
In some corners of MAGA-land, a new civil war is getting under way. The FBI’s arrival at Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening to collect evidence in a criminal investigation related to former President Donald Trump is the trigger that some of his supporters needed to suggest that violence is imminent. Predictably, the unverified Twitter accounts of armchair revolutionaries circulated claims such as “I already bought my ammo” and dark talk of “kinetic civil war” and “Civil War 2.0.”
Not to be outdone, the National Rifle Association posted an image of Justice Clarence Thomas above an indignant quotation from a majority opinion he wrote: “The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second class right.’” Verified right-wing influencers got in on the martial rhetoric, too. “Tomorrow is war. Sleep well,” Steven Crowder promised.
The bad news is that much of this talk is sincere. It is intended to intimidate the people investigating Trump’s many abuses of power, and to galvanize and organize his true believers—some of whom already proved on January 6, 2021, that they will commit violence in his name. The latest such propaganda is shocking to read, mostly because the talk of violence comes so casually to Trump’s apologists. It is all out in the open now.
The good news is that some threats remain merely threats. A violent movement either grows or shrinks. Its ideology is not defeated; it simply stops motivating people to action.
David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic
Trump has a hold on a party that has been offered plenty of exit ramps from its relationship with him, but he is not Voldemort. He has been isolated and humiliated. Many of the individuals who used violence to support him on January 6 are now in jail. His audiences have dwindled. Even on the night of the FBI search, in the area of Florida that he now calls home, an impromptu roadside demonstration in support of him attracted “roughly two dozen” supporters, the Miami Herald reported. “Roughly two dozen” isn’t a revolution. It isn’t even a rally.
For many Americans who wish for a peaceful democracy and remain frustrated about Trump’s continuing influence in Republican primaries, hope springs eternal that someone or something—Robert Mueller, two impeachment drives, and now criminal investigators—will definitively erase his power. But expecting saviors to intervene is the wrong way to think about how the threat of violence from Trump’s supporters might dissipate. Rather, the danger will be over when violent MAGAism becomes a rallying cry for a limited pool of adherents whose online anger fizzles upon contact with the real world.
A win, at this stage, isn’t that Trump’s troops make an apology. It is that they remain an online threat, a cosplay movement, a pretend army that can’t deliver, whose greatest strength is in their heads rather than reality.
Trump, as a former president of the United States, may be a rather unique leader of a violent insurrection, but that doesn’t make the ongoing, multiyear strategy any less effective. The January 6 committee has adopted a counter-insurrection strategy by portraying Trump squarely as the leader of a violent movement, and not simply the leader of the GOP. But some of his more extreme followers are now turning on one another. Members of the Oath Keepers, for example, have spoken to FBI investigators about matters connected with the Capitol riot—a sign that at least some fear legal penalties more than they fear the consequences of breaking with Trump. If the former president’s legal jeopardy deepens, he will in all likelihood try to raise the level of agitation in the days ahead; he knows how to use language that incites followers to violence without giving them specific instruction.
But allow me at least a glimmer of optimism. “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come,” the poet and author Carl Sandburg famously wrote. And the decline of MAGA looks something like that—just a smattering of people respond to the overheated rhetoric of Trump and his allies. If Trump’s supporters only end up cosplaying a civil war, that itself is a small victory.
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