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Not long ago, FBI director Wray told Congress the FBI was just too busy to stop unquestionably illegal intimidation at the homes of Supreme Court justices who actually enforce the Constitution, too busy after an actual assassination attempt.  They were not, obviously, too busy to pull an unprecedented, unnecessary and unlawful raid on Donald Trump.

Now, the FBI, and various D/S/C useful idiots, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, are vigorously defending the FBI.  It seems some of these brave agents think people are sufficiently angry with them to actually do them harm.  These are the same people who not only allowed, but encouraged the paramilitary arm of the D/S/C Party to torch America’s cities, who demanded the police be defunded, who cheered and laughed when police officers were injured during the “summer of love,” who raised money to bail out violent felons who attacked police officers, who eliminated bail, and released violent thugs from jails and prisons, and who encouraged violent thugs to attack and even murder police officers.  It is their Soros prosecutors who prosecute police officers and kiss murderous thugs.  Apparently their concern for the welfare of police officers is only activated when those officers suffer public scorn for carrying out political raids against Normal Americans.

Across America, every police officer, every day, knows they may be killed or injured simply because they wear the badge, because they carry authority on behalf of us all.  Their spouses kiss them goodbye every day knowing they may never see them again.  Obviously, any violence against our police is wrong and should be punished to the greatest extent of the law, but until the FBI demonstrates they’re actually a law enforcement agency rather than D/S/C’s  political enemy suppression force, I’m not going to have much sympathy for them.  Perhaps they should, like every other cop in America already does, simply cowboy up and stop whining.  After all, they’re supposed to be the best and brightest, the most educated, capable and courageous.  They might try acting like it.

We carry on, gentle readers, where we left off with The Second Civil War #38.4: A Brief And Ugly Future.   The SMM SCW archive is here.  The bigger news is the release of a ridiculously redacted warrant affidavit, but before we get to that—it’s less news than it appears—a few related tidbits, beginning with this from the Washington Examiner:

The Justice-backed FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago winter resort home has increased the percentage of people who believe that President Joe Biden is using the G-men as his ‘personal Gestapo.’

In the latest Rasmussen Reports survey, 53% of likely voters agreed that ‘there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI that are using the FBI as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.’

Asked the same question last December, the portion who agreed with that view was 46%.

Hmm.  Perhaps I’m out of line in criticizing the FBI?  Victor Davis Hanson would agree I’m not:

But again, Garland did give a spirited, almost angry defense of the Justice Department and FBI. He was in hot denial that they were anything but professional civil servants. Yet he did not explain why “nuclear secrets,” long sitting in a locked room at Mar-a-Lago, were suddenly putting the nation in harm’s way in a manner they had not eight or 18 months ago.

That raises the question whether Garland is disingenuous or simply naïve. After all, the American people have long trusted their FBI. They want to remain confident in its leadership. Yet it was not the public, but high-ranking Justice and FBI officials themselves—among them most recently Merrick Garland himself—who squandered that confidence. And they should now look inward rather than blast critics for what they have done to themselves and to the country.

As always, gentle readers, take the links I provide to read everything for yourself.  This is always particularly necessary, and worth your time, where VDH is concerned.  But surely the DOJ and FBI are all about fidelity to the letter and spirit of the law, and also in favor of transparency?  Not so much:

The Department of Justice is opposing a request from former President Donald Trump’s attorneys seeking an independent special master to review records that were seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate, even though that process would allow it to appear more impartial following the raid, one of the former president’s attorneys, Alina Habba, said on Newsmax Monday.

‘In these types of situations what happens is the attorney handling it will ask that there be an independent special master, which is an attorney that gets appointed to oversee and to make sure everything is done correctly,’ Habba said on Newsmax’s “Wake Up America,” explaining that the master would be independent of both Trump’s side and that of the DOJ.’

‘It’s a neutral party,’ Habba said. ‘Think of it much like a mediator. They just make sure that the t’s are being crossed, the i’s are being dotted, and there’s no funny business.’

The DOJ and FBI are fond of implying, even saying, “if they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about.”  OK then.  If the DOJ and FBI have done nothing wrong, why do they oppose an independent special master?  This is probably part of the reason:

The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.

In other words, the same FBI thugs who discredited the FBI and DOJ for years, pursuing Russian phantoms and trying to destroy Donald Trump, knowing they had no evidence at all, are now involved in the raid and continuing persecution of Trump.  Hmmm.  Could this sort of thing be why the public’s confidence in the FBI and DOJ is approaching congressional lows?  And what about counterintelligence?  Is the FBI doing any of that anymore?

If all the big guys in counterintelligence are focused on yet another clownish bid to take down Trump, the question to ask now is, who’s minding the counterintelligence store at the FBI?  Do these people no longer find actual counterintelligence work interesting?  Why so little output with such huge resources?  And some actual counterintelligence successes would go a long way to restoring the FBI’s reputation with the public, which now sees it as a politicized Gestapo.

It’s about time these guys did break a major authentic counterintelligence case just to restore their credibility.  But it appears they’ve let that slide by the wayside as they focus instead on useless and likely counterproductive, as well as illegal, political operations.

Someone in Congress, perhaps Sen. Ted Cruz, needs to start asking Director Christopher Wray why his agency isn’t producing a whole lot, if anything, for the counterintelligence job it’s paid for.

And of course we’ve learned President Biden, and his spokesliars at the White House, were lying when they claimed to have no advance knowledge of the Mar-A-Lago raid:

Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump’s estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president’s claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

By all means, take the link and read the whole thing.  At this point—actually, it has been true for decades—we can be certain D/S/Cs are lying whenever their lips are moving.  We also know it because the DOJ is opposing transparency, while constantly leaking details about the case they think damaging to Trump.  Take this link to law Professor Jonathan Turley’s learned commentary on that issue.

Finally, we come to the affidavit.  This article by Prof. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection contains a link to the affidavit.  Allow me, gentle readers, to backtrack a bit.  In obtaining a warrant, an officer must submit an affidavit to the judge, in which they list the laws that have been broken, their probable cause to believe those laws have been broken, and specifying the place to be searched and the very specific things to be seized.  If the probable cause is weak or nonexistent, no judge should authorize a warrant.  Professional police officers absolutely want their affidavits to be known.

This particular affidavit is unusually important because of the unprecedented nature of the DOJ’s actions.  If there is no PC, or weak PC, the warrant should not have been issued in the first place.  If, because of his privileges under the Constitution and the law, the laws listed as justification for the search do not apply to the president, the public needs to know.  As expected, the Affidavit is more than 50% redacted.  Entire pages are black.  The FBI would have us believe this is necessary to protect sources and methods and national security secrets.  It is, however, far more likely they’re protecting themselves from embarrassment and the revelation this is just another in a six year series of witch hunts against Donald Trump and every American who voted for or supports him.

The affidavit reveals virtually nothing that was not already known and/or leaked.  This statement appears on page 2:

Further, there is probable cause to believe that additional documents that contain classified NDI or that are Presidential records subject to record retention requirements currently remain at the PREMISES. There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the PREMISES.

There are several assertions of probable cause throughout the affidavit, but if there is in fact any PC, it’s redacted.  Apparently, we are to trust the FBI on this because they’re the FBI.  This appears on page 11—the document is 38 pages, double-spaced:

According to a CBS Miami article titled ‘’Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago,’ published Monday, January 18, 2021, at least two moving trucks were observed at the PREMISES on January 18, 2021.

This is followed by three pages of total redaction.  Apparently we are to use this CBS report that moving trucks were at Trump’s residence after he moved out of the White House to infer the presence of these trucks at his home is somehow evidence of law breaking, because the rest of page 11, and most of the pages that follow are entirely, or virtually entirely, redacted.

The FBI, despite leaking prodigiously to its favorite media outlets, is screaming these redactions are necessary to protect witnesses and agents, yet they have no difficulty at all in outing Trump Administration lawyer Kash Patel.  This appears on page 19:

I am aware of an article published in Breitbart on May 5, 2022, available at https://www.breitbart.comvolitics/2022i05/05/documents-mar-a-lago-marked-classified-were-alreadv-declassified-kash-patel-savs/, which states that Kash Patel, who is described as a former top POTUS administration official, characterized as ”misleading” reports in other news organizations that NARA had found classified materials among records that POTUS provided to NARA from Mar-a-Lago. Patel alleged that such reports were misleading because FPOTUS had declassified the materials at issue.

This single statement is immediately followed by four pages of redactions.  Why?  Likely to call Patel a liar and/or to try to deny Trump has any power to declassify documents.  If so, any such attempt would be lies.  Perhaps all the redactions contain prodigious probable cause.  Perhaps they build an unassailable, entirely lawful, aboveboard case.  If so, no professional police officer would want to hide that information.  On the contrary, they’d want it fully exposed as widely as possible.  But not the DOJ and FBI.

What relatively little is unredacted does not prove, or very much hint, at grave national security issues.  As I earlier noted, virtually nothing new, and of consequence, is revealed.  The redacted document certainly does not support the idea of an emergency of any kind necessitating the search, and we now know AG Garland took weeks to authorize the warrant, and the FBI took days—such things are normally mandated to be done within 24 hours—to serve it.  So much for any national security emergency.

By all means, gentle readers, take the link and read it for yourself.  It’s so blacked out, it’s easy and quick to read.

One final excerpt from the signature page of the affidavit, where the affiant, in this case a FBI agent, signs and swears everything in the document is complete—nothing is omitted—and absolutely truthful.

Notice the agent’s name is redacted!  Either this agent, and by implication, the entire Bureau, is a coward, or it’s redacted because the agent is one of those who tried, and failed, with the Russia hoax, to get Trump already, and is getting another try.  There is no legitimate reason—none—to withhold this agent’s name, and so doing only confirms American’s darkest suspicions about this case.

Final Thoughts:  If we buy the idea the FBI was terribly worried about whatever documents were present because they were “unsecured,” we need only remember Mar-A-Lago is secured by the Secret Service 24/7/365.  In addition, Trump added extra security to the room where at least some of the documents in question were stored at the government’s request.  They knew everything was safe and secure.

Take this link to a video provided by The Conservative Treehouse of attorney Mike Davis, who clerked for Justice Gorsuch.  He explains why the DOJ’s reliance on the laws they cited is false, and why it’s highly unlikely any of this will ever see a courtroom.  It’s brief, accurate and compelling.

We do not know what has been redacted, but it is more than fair to believe it is hidden not for any legitimate, lawful reason, but to cover government misdeeds.  There is, absent any actual evidence of criminal actions on the part of Mr. Trump, no reason to believe otherwise.

I suspect the only possible charge to be brought against Trump will be relating to Jan. 6.  If so, it will be done much closer to the 2024 election as a means of damaging Trump’s electoral chances as much as possible.  However, we’re dealing with a lawless DOJ, FBI and Meat Puppet Administration.  They may charge Trump with anything and everything, including the kitchen sink, in the hope any possible DC jury will convict him of something–anything–before the prosecution’s opening statement.

More as it develops.