Mar-a-Lago

Shortly after reports surfaced that President Joe Biden's team had found classified documents at his office at the Penn Biden Center this past November, the mainstream media rushed to "contextualize" the story. "Contextualize," in this case, means they justified Biden's mishandling of classified materials and drilled into readers that he was much more responsible in regard to the matter than former president Donald Trump. Biden, they said, had possession of far fewer documents overall and was much more cooperative with the Department of Justice in turning them over to the proper authorities once his team found them. Needless to say, these media attempts to downplay Biden's mishandling of classified materials relative to Trump's have not aged well.

In the wake of Saturday’s horrific shooting at a Lunar New Year celebration in the heavily Asian neighborhood of Monterey Park, California, Democratic lawmakers sprang into action, speculating that the violence may have been racially motivated. Hours later it emerged that the shooter was himself also Asian. The frequency of mass killings in this country is harrowing. But Cockburn finds such tragedies are made all the more gruesome when politicians so often jump ahead of the facts, ascribing motivations or reasons to the violence that are politically beneficial to them or fit their ideological framework. Representative Adam Schiff, for example, pegged “bigotry towards AAPI individuals as a possible motive.

President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn that in November his lawyers had found classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank. No doubt he was equally shocked when more classified docs turned up in his Delaware home. Yet the tone of the mainstream media seems to be that boys will be boys. Since Biden is being so cooperative with authorities after being caught red-handed, maybe this has nothing in common with Donald Trump's cache of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Or Hillary's cache on her private e-mail server. Could there be a double-standard? Biden had some/several/a bunch of classified documents while Trump had hundreds so that's different.

We are still in the early stages of discovering what the documents discovered in Joe Biden's office at the University of Pennsylvania contain and how highly they were classified, so we don’t yet know how dangerous the violation was. But there are things to keep in mind as the story unfolds. 1. Biden’s lawyers did him a huge favor by instructing him not to ask about the documents It’s the last stand of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Still, as one tabloid used to proclaim,“Inquiring minds want to know.” In particular, we want to know how sensitive the material really was (overclassification is a problem in Washington) and where the documents were held between the time Biden left the vice presidency and the time the Penn Biden Center opened. 2.

So where are the FBI SWAT teams? Will they be raiding Joe Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement as they raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home? Of course not. Sure, it turns out that there were classified documents in Biden’s office dating from his time as vice president. But only Trump and Trump-friendly people get the full klieg treatment from the Deep State’s Geheime Staatspolizei.   We do not yet know exactly what is in Biden’s documents, though news reports acknowledge that some of the material was marked “sensitive compartmented information,” also known as SCI, a designation used for “highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.

“I think the former president is a spent political force.” So wrote New York Times columnist Bret Stephens of Donald J. Trump this week. Trump is apparently so spent that Stephens felt the need to pen an 879-word op-ed in the nation’s putatively leading newspaper about who the master of Mar-a-Lago ate dinner with a week earlier. This followed a separate article about the infamous dinner Trump hosted with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes that Stephens wrote with his co-columnist Gail Collins, along with no fewer than seven other pieces about the dinner that have, as of this writing, blessed the former paper of record. The Times is hardly alone. The Washington Post offered its readers six articles about the dinner, while the Wall Street Journal has produced five such pieces.

Donald Trump has caused something of a hugger-mugger over his last supper with Kanye West, or Ye, and Nick Fuentes. A variety of Jewish organizations are either wringing their collective hands (if they’ve been supporters of Trump) or outright denouncing him (if they’ve long viewed him as an odious figure). A few Republican leaders, including former vice president Mike Pence, who said it was “wrong” for Trump to break bread with the duo, are voicing their disapprobation. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie tweeted on Saturday: “This is just awful, unacceptable conduct from anyone, but most particularly from a former President and current candidate.” Unlike previous Trump controversies, this one does not appear to be subsiding after a 24-hour news cycle.

While you were carving the turkey with your family last night, Kanye West was on Twitter, unveiling his 2024 masterplan. On Thanksgiving night, the rapper posted a video titled “Mar-a-Lago debrief,” in which he said Donald Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes.” That would be the same Nick Fuentes who heads up the far-right incel-adjacent "groyper" movement, attended both the Charlottesville and January 6 protests (he was on the steps of the Capitol) and has spoken critically about the notion that America is a "Judeo-Christian" nation. Also, like Milo Yiannopoulos, he's now working on the Kanye 2024 campaign. With friends like these... https://twitter.

The red wave didn’t happen, but Mother Nature is unleashing waves of torrential rain on Mar-a-Lago ahead of the wedding of Donald Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, to billionaire Michael Boulos, set for this weekend. Cockburn can’t help but marvel how Hurricane Nicole spared Ron DeSantis’s reelection on Tuesday, but is now, along with Republicans everywhere, unleashing some Old Testament-style vengeance on the Trump family. Tiffany Trump is reportedly “flipping out” as Mar-a-Lago has been partially evacuated and staff sent home ahead of the impending storm. Much like the red wave Trump was prepared to take credit for, Page Six reports that many Trump friends “might not make it” to the party (just as they failed to make it to their own victory parties earlier this week).

Some people are expending a lot of emotional energy on the excerpt in the Atlantic from Maggie Haberman’s new book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. It’s anti-Trump, of course, so it feeds a certain well-formed habit. But it strikes me as pretty thin gruel. The essay is based on three interviews that Haberman, White House correspondent for the New York Times, conducted over the spring and summer of 2021, the first two at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach Residence, the third at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. A tag line for the Atlantic excerpt tells readers that the former president “tried to sell his preferred version of himself, but said much more than he intended.” Did he? A lot has been made of two statements.

The appointment of a special master is usually a case of much ado about nothing. Except with Donald Trump and his war with the Department of Justice, there is never "nothing." A special master is an independent party appointed by the court, in this instance to “review the seized property for personal items and documents and potentially privileged material subject to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege.” In other words, the master will look at the pile of documents and other items seized from Mar-a-Lago by the DOJ under its search warrant and decide which ones they can keep to review and use in their prosecution and which ones are not allowed based on the limits of the warrants and privilege.

It was Saturday morning and MSNBC's Tiffany Cross had a bee in her bonnet. With Senator Lindsey Graham predicting riots in the streets, with Donald Trump reacting to the FBI raid on his home like the Archduke Ferdinand had just been offed, Cross told her audience, "These days, it feels like we are not just at the brink of a civil war, but that one has already begun." Six months ago, here's how I would have responded to Cross: of course this is what a hyper-partisan MSNBC host would say. Civil war fears are really just LARPing by Twitter elites who thrive on hatred of the other side and so assume everyone else must too. "WE'RE GOING IN!" screams Elie Mystal as he screeches up in a Power Wheels Jeep while waving around a purple and orange Nerf Kalashnikov.

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.