A new report is shedding light on exactly how the DOJ investigation into Donald Trump over supposed “classified documents” at Mar-a-Lago got started. The FBI recently raided the former president’s Florida home, claiming possible violations of the Espionage Act and other national security concerns.
What flowed after the unprecedented action was a series of coordinated leaks from inside the government meant to make Trump look guilty of crimes. But how did things get that far?
Apparently, it started with the National Archives, which is run by a partisan hack who decided to treat Trump differently from all other presidents before him. When Barack Obama took millions of pages of documents, including many that were undoubtedly classified, upon leaving office, the National Archives gave him a sweetheart deal allowing him to digitize everything at a later date (none of that has happened all these years later and surprise, no raid). Heck, there are presidents whose libraries still haven’t returned requested documents decades after their deaths. For Trump, though, the National Archives didn’t even give him a year before running to the DOJ to push for a criminal investigation.
With the “crime” pinpointed, the National Archives and the DOJ still needed a legal hook, and apparently, they got it by directly coordinating with the Biden administration. That’s been revealed via memos reviewed by Just The News.
The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump’s Florida home.
By May, Su conveyed to the Archives that President Joe Biden would not object to waiving his predecessor’s claims to executive claims, a decision that opened the door for DOJ to get a grand jury to issue a subpoena compelling Trump to turn over any remaining materials he possessed from his presidency.
The machinations are summarized in several memos and emails exchanged between the various agencies in spring 2022, months before the FBI took the added unprecedented step of raiding Trump’s Florida compound with a court-issued search warrant.
One specific letter to Trump’s legal team outlines Biden’s White House counsel telling the National Archives that the administration was waiving Trump’s previous claims of executive privilege.
That letter revealed Biden empowered the National Archives and Records Administration to waive any claims to executive privilege that Trump might assert to block DOJ from gaining access to the documents.
“The Counsel to the President has informed me that, in light of the particular circumstances presented here, President Biden defers to my determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not I should uphold the former President’s purported ‘protective assertion of executive privilege,'” Wall wrote. “… I have therefore decided not to honor the former President’s ‘protective’ claim of privilege.”
My colleague Matt Margolis over at PJ Media describes what happened here as entrapment, and I concur. That’s exactly what this looks like. Trump had done what many presidents before him had done, which is to claim executive privilege over documents originating from his administration. The idea that a later president, specifically a political rival, could then waive that, allowing a criminal investigation to snap into place is insane, but that’s what happened here.
The DOJ had no right to review those documents, but Biden coordinated with them and the National Archives to remove all legal roadblocks in order to make the current pursuit of Trump possible. It’s the Russian collusion hoax all over again, except instead of the garbage Steele Dossier serving as the hook, you have a letter from Biden’s lawyer nuking the executive privilege of a former president. The concept is the same, and just as importantly, the motive is the same: Get Trump by any means necessary.
The obvious implication here is that the Biden administration lied when they said they had no involvement in the DOJ’s investigation of Trump over these records. Clearly, they did because it was their actions that allowed it to progress in the first place, and they knew what the DOJ was after from the beginning. Instead of sticking to precedent, Biden took the radical step of abusing executive privilege to target his primary political opponent in order to provide the basis for a criminal investigation against him. The level of corruption and abuse of power is mind-blowing. Some might even call it impeachable.