Two senior government officials were granted anonymity by Newsweek in exchange for their take on Monday’s raid on Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida.
As a result, they were surprisingly candid: the FBI blew it, spectacularly. According to 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.
A confidential informer told the FBI what documents Donald Trump was hiding at Mar-a-Lago, and where. The former president was at a rally on August 05, 2022, in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
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….
“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…. It really is a case of the Bureau misreading the impact.”
The reverberations following that “misreading” are just beginning to show up. The misfire is so spectacular that some journalists are calling it a gift to former president and likely future candidate Donald Trump. Writing at Election Central, Nate Ashworth said,
If it weren’t so ridiculous, it would almost seem like the FBI did Trump a favor by executing this warrant over documents in a way that continues to demonstrate the two-tier justice system that forgives illegal behavior by Democrats and magnifies any and all behavior of Republicans.
Far-left Democrat Andrew Yang, a one-time Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted:
I’m no Trump fan. I want him as far away from the White House as possible. But a fundamental part of his appeal has been that it’s him against a corrupt government establishment.
This raid strengthens that case for millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution.
Politico’s Playbook quoted “a legal expert”:
If they raided his home just to find classified documents he took from The White House, he will be re-elected president in 2024, hands down.
It will prove to be the greatest law enforcement mistake in history.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, host of CNN’s “The View” said on Tuesday:
This, I’m hoping, goes beyond simply not complying with some archiving laws, or [else] DOJ just handed Donald Trump the Republican nomination and potentially the presidency.
If it’s seen as some sort of massive overreach and not something incredibly serious, this is a very good day for Donald Trump.
Just how good a day? A quick poll done by Trafalgar the two days after the raid revealed its initial impact on expected general election voters. Of Republican voters, 83% say the raid has “increased their motivation” to vote in the 2022 election, and 72% of Independent voters agree.
The poll also revealed that the FBI’s spectacular misfire resulted in more than three-fourths of Republicans believing that Trump’s enemies were behind the raid, along with 54% of Independent voters.
An important footnote: It has just been revealed that the FBI demanded that security cameras at Mar-a-Lago be turned off but the staff refused. This gives the Trump reelection campaign hours of material that will no doubt be used to remind his base of the outrageous overreach that occurred at his home on Monday, August 8, 2022.
Related article:
Anti-Trump Lawyer Spills the Beans: Mar-a-Lago Raid Seeks to Keep Trump From Running in 2024
