Hard as it may be to believe that President Joe Biden knew nothing about the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, as the White House insists, it’s easy to understand why he should leave the matter in the hands of the Justice Department, where it belongs.
Controversy over the court-approved FBI search was followed immediately by a partisan firestorm, a disturbing escalation of violence and unhinged threats linked to right-wing rhetoric.
Three days after the raid, an Ohio man identified as Ricky Shiffer, 42, tried to breach the visitor screening facility at the FBI’s Cincinnati office. He fled and later was fatally shot after firing multiple rounds at police during an hourslong standoff. His social media posts on an account bearing Shiffer’s name stated that the account user was enraged by the search at Mar-a-Lago.
Even U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart faced death threats for approving the search warrant, which is part of a probe into whether Trump illegally held onto classified documents from his presidential days.
For performing his job, the judge’s home address was posted on right-wing sites, along with antisemitic slurs, leading the South Florida synagogue he attends to cancel its Shabbat services the following Friday night.
Sadly, this sort of dangerous harassment has only increased since Jan. 6. The FBI announced last September that it had more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload from roughly 1,000 in the spring of last year to about 2,700 investigations in the fall.
“Today, terrorism moves at the speed of social media,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last year.
Indeed, it does, which gives a bracing significance to Trump’s recently adopted pose as a supposed peacemaker. A person close to Trump reached out to a Justice Department official to give Attorney General Merrick Garland a message, The New York Times reported Saturday: “The country is on fire. What can I do to reduce the heat?”
Is that a warning, asked skeptics in the Twitterverse, or is it a threat?
Good question. Moving to the friendlier confines of Fox News Digital on Monday, Trump elaborated to an interviewer that “the country is in a very dangerous position.” He attacked “all of the scams and this new one,” and offered, “If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that.”
How helpful. Of course, we and countless other voices have persistently reminded Trump that he knows perfectly what he can — and should — do to reduce the heat. Turn off his inflammatory rhetoric.
Instead, his offer of assistance sounds in tone like a heavy in an old Chicago gangster movie. “Nice little democracy you have here. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it.”
Little moderation of his fury could be heard even in his Fox interview as he went on to claim without evidence that FBI agents “break in and take whatever they want to take” and suggest that they “could have planted anything they wanted.”
An actual inventory of the material taken from Trump’s home that was released on Friday showed that FBI agents took 11 sets of documents during the search that were marked as confidential or secret. Some were marked as “classified/TS/SCI” — shorthand for “top secret/sensitive compartmented information” that under normal protocols should be viewed only in a secure government facility.
That’s because more than one former president’s reputation is at stake here. So, it appears, is our national security.
Contrary to disinformation from Trump and his team, the FBI turned to a court-approved search after repeated delays and stonewalling over the course of the past year. The National Archives and Records Administration went so far as to issue a statement in August to counter misinformation from Trump and his allies that former President Barack Obama had not turned over all of his records.
Stalling and misinformation have become a familiar tactic to anyone who has followed Trump’s legal maneuverings over the years. When he claimed belatedly that he actually had declassified the documents in question after borrowing them from the archives, without providing any documentation or witnesses, it sounded like typical Trump: Making up the rules as he goes along.
As much as his apologists complain about the “unprecedented” nature of the search of a former president’s home, no former American president has drawn suspicions that are in any way comparable.
Now, amid the relentless noise fueled by political outrage on the left, right and persuadable middle, the task of clarifying this investigation and others looming around the Trump presidency falls on Garland.
While it is far from clear exactly why Trump has tried so ferociously to cling to the files, it is the job of the nation’s chief law enforcer to determine whether and how laws were broken, not just to hold this former president accountable but also to set precedents and norms for future presidents to follow.
Holding the president accountable has begun to sound like a cliche to some, after it has been said so often. Yet, accountability of officeholders and those who enforce the laws is essential, especially when the very notions of fairness and justice are under assault by those who appear to think rules were made to be broken.
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