Republicans pivot on their stance of the FBI after former President Donald Trump’s estate was raided.
Opinion by Asher Miles, Staff Writer
Americans are still recovering from the whiplash after watching the GOP sharply pivot from touting “law and order” to pleading “defund the FBI” after the unannounced FBI raid of Former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. But no one mourns the wicked, and Trump is already looking to wiggle his way out of this one.
According to the Department of Justice, Trump secretly transferred more than 100 top secret files from the white house and sequestered them in his $160 million resort.
Violations of the law that are worthy of an indictment are par for the course for Trump. His ill-regard for the Espionage Act, illegal destruction of government records and gathering of classified documents necessitate not only an FBI raid but should lead to criminal charges. If “45” is not indicted for his crimes, then he will be an authority which is above the law.
Ever-increasing GOP lawmakers and candidates continue to believe the raid was a “hoax.” Particular supporters sycophantically suggest that the FBI agents involved in the raid should be fired, and the orchestrated plan was a plot to prevent Trump from running for the presidency in 2024.
“If you played any role in this raid, you should be gone,” said Don Bongino, the three-time Congress hopeful and conservative host and commentator on Fox News. “It's time to clean house. Draining the swamp has to be a top priority for whoever the GOP puts in the White House next.”
According to the DOJ, Trump failed to follow the guidelines in Executive Order 13526, the legal process for safeguarding national security information. If indicted, the former president will be found guilty of breaching the Espionage Act, particularly Section 793, which applies to gathering information pertaining to national defense, as nuclear documents were found at the resort.
“I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it,” Trump said on Hugh Hewitt’s conservative talk show. In response to if he were to be indicted Trump said, “I think if it happened, I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.”
In an attempt to stall, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that the DOJ must stop the review of the seized files by appointing Trump-approved “special master” Raymond Dearie. Dearie would have had over 70 days to review the secret files, washing the Mar-a-Lago raid from America’s short-term consciousnesses. However, Trump's tactics fell short this time, for the appeals court lifted the hold that prevented the Justice Department from analyzing the documents in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
Former President Trump now joins the four other presidents who have faced FBI investigation, joining the ranks of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
Trump has touted that the FBI is run by democrats, but forgets to mention the decades-long conservative ideological support of the FBI. A famous example is when the FBI orchestrated a series of illegal and surreptitious programs to disrupt and divide American political groups, such as the Black Panthers, feminist organizations and the anti-war protestors named COINTELPRO. One would only say such a thing if they were ignorant of the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton, the wire tappings of Martin Luther King's phone calls, and use of psychological warfare. If the FBI was overrun by liberals and leftists, then they were going against their interests in 2020 when a kidnapping plot of Michigan’s Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, went astray when five of the planners were discovered to be FBI informants and/or undercover FBI agents. The FBI is not a leftist or conservative organization. It’s a status quo organization.
Americans must focus on the three facts: that Trump violated the Espionage Act, stole and destroyed classified documents and concealed files from the DOJ. If he were anyone else, he would have been locked up a long time ago. If “Teflon Don” dances through this, then he will officially prove that he can defy the law.