Donald trrump

What would you do if you were Merrick Garland? Would you prosecute Trump? Or would you walk away, concerned you were playing politics? Step one appears easy: put off any decision until after the midterms. Trump is not a candidate, key issues driving the midterms (inflation, Roe) are not his issues, and while Trump is actively stumping for many candidates, initiating any prosecution before the midterms is just too obvious. Nothing else about Mar-a-Lago has had an urgency to it (months passed from the initial voluntary turnover of documents and the forced search) and announcing an indictment now would be a terrible opening move. So if you're Garland, you have some time.

So the big guy wants a donnybrook then. It began with Lindsey Graham announcing on Fox News a day or so ago that there will — not may — be “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is indicted by the Justice Department. Trump then reposted Graham’s remark on his badly failing social media outlet Truth Social, which, like most of his ventures, appears to be headed for bankruptcy, only this time there’s no Papa Trump to show up at the casino to buy a stack of chips to bail out the scapegrace son. Now, Trump has gone on something of an internet bender, indulging his thwarted Twitter impulses by posting over sixty times on Truth Social. If the venture goes belly up, it won’t be because Trump ignored it. As Trump tries to seize the spotlight, the GOP is squirming.

At first read, the newly released Mar-a-Lago search warrant reveals little, with about half its pages redacted. It does suggest two possible narratives going forward, one of which has severe political implications: the National Archives sicced the FBI on Candidate Trump. The warrant says the search was based on “a significant number of civilian witnesses” to Trump’s actions and the Twitterverse is already speculating as to who that might be (Ivanka or the butler?). This will generate a thousand conspiracy theories as to who first told the FBI about the classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago. But in the end, it adds little to key questions.

It always ends up back with the Clintons, doesn't it? The laws Trump may be charged under at Mar-a-Lago appear to have been violated by both of the Clintons, yet the two were never searched, never mind charged and never prosecuted. Any action against Trump must account for that to preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest. The more obvious case involves former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server that processed classified material on a daily basis.

Pittsburgh Fresh off the campaign stage in Arizona, where he stumped for gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Florida governor Ron DeSantis made his way to Pittsburgh for another Turning Point Action rally. This one was supposedly for Doug Mastriano (DeSantis was headed to Ohio for J.D. Vance right afterward), who’s challenging state attorney general Josh Shapiro to replace Democratic governor Tom Wolf — but his address sounded every word a DeSantis 2024 presidential speech. The polls suggest Mastriano needs all the help he can get, as Shapiro — who has already spent $12 million on ads — leads Mastriano — running a “shoestring campaign” — by a healthy margin (one recent poll has Shapiro leading by fifteen points). But DeSantis hardly mentioned Mastriano at all.

With the collapse of Liz Cheney's political career in Wyoming, Donald Trump's supporters are fully ensconced in the vast majority of critical candidacies headed into November. He and his supporters have remade the GOP, at least for the moment, into a party devoted to the Trumpian America First agenda and running on that set of priorities — at least when it comes to the lip service they give to border concerns, trade, anti-globalism and culture war issues. But will this be a Republican Party that actually delivers on these priorities should they receive voters' endorsement in November? That’s a more questionable proposition. The core problem that many traditional GOP forces have with a Trumpian agenda is one of prioritization, not of positioning.

Another week, another silver bullet misses Donald Trump. Once more we suffered through the same endless roll of waves of crimes, accusations, near-indictments and just bad words to which we'd become accustomed during the Trump presidency. We went from "Trump has classified material under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago" to a group of people paying $1,800 to fly a banner reading "ha ha ha ha" over the resort to mock a Trump staying 3,000 miles away in New York. On cue, the regulars on MSNBC and CNN brought out their running-dog former CIA and FBI officers to tell us tick-tock, the walls are closing in, this time it will stick, Trump is going down, he'll be in jail before he runs again for office. If we can't stop him with the electoral system, we'll use the judicial system. This. Is. The.

What is a classified document? Donald Trump seems to have lots of them — and the FBI sure wants them back. In the wake of my first book critical of the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction program, Diplomatic Security began a deep dive into my life in an attempt to find something over which to prosecute me. A colleague passed on a bit of personnel gossip via his official email to my Yahoo! Account — and the chase was on. Diplomatic Security claimed I was in possession of “classified” material at home and referred my case to the Justice Department. The email in question was simply labeled “For Official Use Only,” or FOUO, a standard tag then automatically applied to all email sent by State in the unclassified system.

The two most striking features of the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are its bold intrusiveness and the public’s mistrust of the Bureau’s honesty and integrity. The Department of Justice could have used low-profile subpoenas to force Trump to turn over any documents, including the most sensitive ones. It didn’t. Instead, it sent carloads of federal agents to search the former president’s house. That raid was also unusual in a second sense. Although mishandling federal documents is a felony, it happens with some frequency, alas, and is almost never subject to full-scale raids. The blowback has been a Category 5 storm. The damage has grown because the FBI and Department of Justice remained silent for three days, refusing to explain their actions.