FBI 'raided' Mar-a-Lago

[Brian4Liberty]

...
No, I believe the election was fair because I've seen no evidence that any irregularities changed the outcome. Even Trump's AG Barr came to that conclusion.

No, that is not the case at all. In the thread about Dan Crenshaw, there is a 2 hour podcast with Bill Barr, and his conclusion is that there was plenty wrong with the election. His position is that it is almost exclusively an issue for states to deal with, not his problem. And his position on bringing any charges against anyone is that he will not do it until there is blatant guilt easily proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. He saw plenty of likely and probable crime, but his position is that he will not bring charges.

Whoa...apples and bowling balls there...just because the outcome did not significantly change, does not mean that the election was "fair", honest and correct.

The outcome probably was changed. Bill Barr does blame it on Trump himself. Barr says that Trump was repeatedly told to prepare a massive legal effort and teams in every state to battle election rule changes and questionable events during the election. He says Trump didn’t want to spend any money on it, because he was confident of an easy victory.

[Brian4Liberty]

2 realities.

You live in a reality where the FBI act with integrity and honor.

We live in a reality where the FBI has repeatedly earned our distrust.

From your side, the redactions are wholly necessary and justified.

From our side of reality, the redactions are almost certainly to cover up the FBI's misdeeds versus any kind of legitimate reason.

And when the truth does come out - as it always does - in 1 year, 5 years, or 50 years -

Our side of reality, will be proven right, again. (as we have been, again, and again, and again, and again)

And your side of reality, will just carry on pretending like this never even happened.

They really don't care if their version of “reality” is true. Pushing the agenda and winning at any cost trumps any other concerns. BAMN.

[dannno]

The outcome probably was changed. Bill Barr does blame it on Trump himself. Barr says that Trump was repeatedly told to prepare a massive legal effort and teams in every state to battle election rule changes and questionable events during the election. He says Trump didn’t want to spend any money on it, because he was confident of an easy victory.

Great, another excuse for Sonny, the Democrats cheated Trump out of the election, but he didn't prepare an adequate legal team to deal with the fraud, so it's really Trump's fault.

[Brian4Liberty]

Great, another excuse for Sonny, the Democrats cheated Trump out of the election, but he didn't prepare an adequate legal team to deal with the fraud, so it's really Trump's fault.

Kind of ironic coming from an AG. “That home invasion robbery was your fault, because you weren’t waiting at the door with a shotgun and a legal team.”

[Sonny Tufts]

there is a 2 hour podcast with Bill Barr, and his conclusion is that there was plenty wrong with the election. His position is that it is almost exclusively an issue for states to deal with, not his problem. And his position on bringing any charges against anyone is that he will not do it until there is blatant guilt easily proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. He saw plenty of likely and probable crime, but his position is that he will not bring charges.

The issue isn't about bringing criminal charges; it's whether there were irregularities that were so severe that the election should be overturned.

Here's Barr calling Trump's claims BS:

[Brian4Liberty]

The issue isn't about bringing criminal charges; it's whether there were irregularities that were so severe that the election should be overturned.

Here's Barr calling Trump's claims BS:

I can’t imagine Barr would spin things differently testifying under oath than he would on an informal podcast.

Barr was against publicly making claims that the election was stolen. His statement there was ambiguous, did Barr mean election fraud claims were BS, or Trump making the claims publicly as President was BS? In longer format, Barr goes into detail about how he doesn't like the way that Trump operates, shooting from the hip and creating divisive drama. He doesn't want a President undermining the integrity of the election process, even if it is flawed, prone to fraud, or manipulated.

Barr was there to essentially do nothing, and make Trump sure didn’t do anything outrageous. Public claims of election stealing were too much for Barr, and he knew it was over anyway.

[Sonny Tufts]

The issues of classification and declassification may be beside the point. None of the statutes cited in the application for the search warrant deals specifically with classified information.

18 USC 793 deals with national defense information, regardless of whether it’s classified.

18 USC 1519 and 2071 deal with records in general without regard to their classification.

So in any prosecution for a violation of any of these statutes the government wouldn't need to prove that any of the documents were classified, although it would doubtless attempt to do so..

[TheTexan]

I'd say it's certainly a possibility, but I haven't seen anything to make such a belief reasonable.

Patel has said that the White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings. If that's true then it should be easy to show that counsel was notified to do so and to have somebody in the counsel's office come forward and say something like "Yes, here's the email from Mr. Patel telling us that the President had declassified some material but in the rush to get everything done before the new administration arrived, we just dropped the ball." Wonder why nobody in the counsel's office has come forward to corroborate Patel?

In addition, unless counsel was given an inventory of the documents that were allegedly declassified how could it have possibly generated the paperwork? Where's the inventory?

What if it fell through the cracks before any paperwork was generated?

Trump - get these declassified ASAP.
Patel - yes sir.
Patel - hey jill, i've put the documents here on your desk that we talked about that need to be declassified. Please make sure these get declassified in today's 2pm batch
Jill - sure thing
Jill - does nails
Jill - talks on phone
1 week goes by
Bob - hey Jill these documents are on your desk for a week can we take them back to storage
Jill - ya sure whatever

Sonny, the fact that you can't even envision a scenario like that happening, means one of two things:

1) you've got TDS and in a context outside of Trump you would have answered my question differently, or
2) you're just a mega authoritarian who believes the government is perfect and cannot make mistakes

Which one is it?

[TheTexan]

If you're sayng that any irregularity makes an election unfair then no election is ever fair. Fairness is a matter of degree. If a candidate would have lost no matter what, why would the election be unfair?

What happened at the TCF center in Detroit is not just an "irregularity" it was a massive amount of organized intentional breaking of election laws that was observed to always be in one party's favor.

There were something like 100 witnesses that told the same story. Ballots were being "remediated" in favor of Biden. When challengers brought forth an official challenge, they were ignored. When challengers went to the supervisor to alert them of this, they were ignored.

Ballot challenges against Biden were being ignored as a matter of policy.

In Detroit election law, every challenge must be recorded. The only exception is if the challenger was being willfully obstructive (which they generally were not being accused of). Otherwise the challenges must be recorded, and throughout the entire building, they weren't.

We will never know how many ballots were challenged. The whole point of the challengers is to bring forth challenges. And the whole point of the challengers is to have a transparent fair election.

Some of the counters didn't even have challengers at all - they had been thrown out for breaking arbitrarily enforced covid distance rules.

Regardless of whatever "justifiable" reasons the court cases were dismissed, there is absolutely nothing "justifiable" about the above happening.

And there has been 0 recourse, 0 audits, 0 acknowledgements.

Even if it is Trump's legal team's fault, does that make this situation any better? Does it make people any less angry?

[GlennwaldSnowdenAssanged]

Do you actually believe that more people turned out and voted for Biden than any other US election in history?

@Sonny Tufts

[TheTexan]

But did any of these affidavits prove that violation of the election laws caused a different result?

The testimonies taken together did suggest that it was indeed very possible that the shenanigans could have changed the result.

At the very minimum, audits were warranted, to be able to prove it.

0 audits.

[TheTexan]

In Olympic sports when a player is caught massively cheating, do they:
1) disqualify him, or
2) let him keep playing and expect the other players to prove that they would have won without the cheating

[Sonny Tufts]

What if it fell through the cracks before any paperwork was generated?

Trump - get these declassified ASAP.
Patel - yes sir.
Patel - hey jill, i've put the documents here on your desk that we talked about that need to be declassified. Please make sure these get declassified in today's 2pm batch
Jill - sure thing
Jill - does nails
Jill - talks on phone
1 week goes by
Bob - hey Jill these documents are on your desk for a week can we take them back to storage
Jill - ya sure whatever

Sonny, the fact that you can't even envision a scenario like that happening, means one of two things:

1) you've got TDS and in a context outside of Trump you would have answered my question differently, or
2) you're just a mega authoritarian who believes the government is perfect and cannot make mistakes

Which one is it?

Neither.

Did Patel or anyone else ever follow up to see if counsel had generated a written declassification and that Trump signed it?

Who the hell is Jill? Some steno that Patel trusted with stuff that at one time had been classified WAY above her grade and whose word should have been taken (by Bob) that material THAT WAS STILL MARKED AS CLASSIFIED could just be taken to some storeroom?

If something even remotely like this happened don't you think Patel or some other Trump sycophant would have figured it out by now and publicized the fact?

What a dumb example. I expected a better response from you.

[Sonny Tufts]

suggest...very possible..could have...

Nice qualifiers.

Arizona had an audit in Maricopa County. It found that Biden got 99 more votes than originally reported and Trump got 261 fewer. Oops...never mind.

[TheTexan]

Neither.

Did Patel or anyone else ever follow up to see if counsel had generated a written declassification and that Trump signed it?

Who the hell is Jill? Some steno that Patel trusted with stuff that at one time had been classified WAY above her grade and whose word should have been taken (by Bob) that material THAT WAS STILL MARKED AS CLASSIFIED could just be taken to some storeroom?

If something even remotely like this happened don't you think Patel or some other Trump sycophant would have figured it out by now and publicized the fact?

What a dumb example. I expected a better response from you.

LOL thank you for proving my point.

I provided a reasonable example of how it could happen and you constructed various strawmen assumptions to try to invalidate it.

Definitely TDS as if anyone ever had any doubt.

[TheTexan]

Nice qualifiers.

You expect people to prove, conclusively, that they would have won the election, without an audit?

LOL

Arizona had an audit in Maricopa County. It found that Biden got 99 more votes than originally reported and Trump got 261 fewer. Oops...never mind.

1 audit, in 1 county, months after the fact? is that all you got.

[Sonny Tufts]

What happened at the TCF center in Detroit is not just an "irregularity" it was a massive amount of organized intentional breaking of election laws that was observed to always be in one party's favor.

Barr didn't think so.

William Barr, President Donald Trump's former attorney general, told the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot that he advised Trump there was no evidence of election fraud in Detroit.

During pre-recorded testimony aired Monday, Barr said that after the 2020 election, Trump "didn't seem to be listening" to him and members of his Cabinet who repeatedly told him there was no validity to his claims that the election had been stolen from him, including in Detroit.

Unproven claims of fraud in Detroit, a Democratic stronghold, have underpinned some Republicans' push to overturn Joe Biden's 154,000-vote victory over Trump in Michigan in the 2020 presidential election.

On Dec. 1, 2020, Barr told the Associated Press there was no evidence of election fraud. Later that day, he was summoned to the White House for a meeting with Trump.

"The president was as mad as I've ever seen him," Barr testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump raised "the big vote dump, as he called it, in Detroit," Barr said. "He said ‘people saw boxes coming into the counting station at all hours of the morning' and so forth."

Barr said he explained to Trump that Detroit centralized its counting process at the TCF Center downtown convention hall rather than in each precinct. For the November 2020 general election, Michigan's largest city counted its absentee ballots at the convention center under the supervision of state Bureau of Election Director Chris Thomas. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, most ballots cast were absentee.

They’re moved to counting stations," Barr said. "And so the normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours."

"I said, 'Did anyone point out to you ... that you did better in Detroit than you did last time? There’s no indication of fraud in Detroit," Barr said he told Trump.

Trump's percentage of votes went from 3% in 2016 to 5% four years later in the Democratic stronghold, and the Republican former president received almost 5,000 more votes than in 2016, according to the city's official results. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/ne...ee/7610562001/

Even if it is Trump's legal team's fault

Funny you should mention that.

[Sidney] Powell filed a lawsuit against Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and other state officials on November 25, alleging a variety of violations of the election code and asking the court to decertify the state's election results or certify them for Trump. In the lawsuit, Powell submitted a witness's declaration that Joe Biden had "received more than 100% of the votes" in Edison County; however, there is no Edison County in Michigan or any other U.S. state. There is an Edison Township in Minnesota, leading to speculation that the information was again taken from a list of Minnesota precincts.

U.S. district judge Linda V. Parker denied the requested relief on December 7, stating that the plaintiffs had only offered "theories, conjecture, and speculation" of potential vote switching. The judge also declared that the "ship has sailed" for most of the relief requested by the plaintiffs, while the rest "is beyond the power of any court". Furthermore, Parker wrote that the relief requested would "greatly harm the public interest" and felt that the plaintiffs' motive for filing the case was not to win, but rather to shake "people's faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government". Powell has filed an appeal of the decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied a motion for expedited review of the case. The city of Detroit has called for sanctions against the plaintiffs in the case as well as their counsel, requesting that Powell and the other attorneys be disbarred for "trying to use this court's processes to validate their conspiracy theories". Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel filed a similar motion on January 28, 2021, accusing Powell and three Michigan lawyers of violating their oaths by attempting to overturn Biden's victory. On February 1, 2021, Nessel, along with Michigan governor Whitmer and Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson, filed complaints with the State Bar of Texas seeking Powell's disbarment.

During a July 2021 hearing to consider sanctions against Powell and other attorneys for their activities in Michigan, Parker discussed the hundreds of pages of allegations by others that the attorneys had submitted to courts, which included an individual claiming to have witnessed poll workers changing votes from Trump to Biden. None of the attorneys responded when Parker asked if they had spoken to the witness to vet their allegation.

On August 25, 2021, Judge Parker ruled that Powell, L. Lin Wood, and seven other pro-Trump lawyers, had filed the suit "in bad faith and for an improper purpose"; that their litigation was a "a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process"; and that they had filed a baseless, frivolous lawsuit in order to undermine public confidence in the democratic process. The court ordered that they pay attorney's fees to the City of Detroit and State of Michigan to reimburse them for the costs of defending against the suit, and referred them to their respective state bars for investigation into ethical violations, which could lead to disbarment.

On November 4, 2021, a closed-door investigatory hearing was held by the State Bar of Texas to begin the process of determining possible sanctions or disbarment for Powell. On December 2, 2021, Judge Parker ordered Powell, Wood and the other "Kraken" attorneys to pay $175,250 to the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Powell#Michigan

[Sonny Tufts]

I provided a reasonable example of how it could happen

There is more reason at a Flat Earth Society meeting than in your example.

[TheTexan]

Barr didn't think so.

There's no reason to believe that Barr did any investigation whatsoever. As such, his opinion isn't any more valid than yours or mine. You and I probably know more about the 2020 election than he does.

If you want to hand-wave away my description of the top-to-bottom corruption of the TCF Center, as obvious lies and right-wing propaganda, feel free to do so as I am long beyond caring on this issue.

You live in a nice bubble where certain things you know to be true are true, and I certainly wouldn't want to upset that delicate balance. Sincerely. I am happy and envious for you, that you can live so peacefully with so many delusions.

[TheTexan]

There is more reason at a Flat Earth Society meeting than in your example.

And there is more sanity in the average patient at Bellevue than there is in your TDS brain

[Sonny Tufts]

@Sonny Tufts

I think you mean to ask if I believe Biden got more popular votes than any other President in history. That's what the certified election results indicate, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. Trump got more votes than any other President in history. Should I disbelieve his totals?

[ClaytonB]

[fcreature]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...ical-bias-und/

https://justthenews.com/government/f...tedly-escorted

Whistleblowers alleged that Thibault concealed the partisan nature of evidence from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland to secure their approval to open an investigation into former President Donald Trump. That investigation culminated in the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.

The public release of the affidavit that accompanied the search warrant revealed the warrant application relied heavily on information from news articles, including a CBS Miami piece titled “Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” and a Breitbart News article in which former Trump adviser Kash Patel discussed the classified status of documents the bureau previously removed from the estate on behalf of the National Archives.

LOL when will the FBI / DOJ authoritarian shills in this thread just give up?

[Brian4Liberty]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...ical-bias-und/

https://justthenews.com/government/f...tedly-escorted



LOL when will the FBI / DOJ authoritarian shills in this thread just give up?

Since when have "news" articles ever been valid evidence in the courts?

It's the good old Pelosi wrap-up smear...

[Sonny Tufts]

LOL when will the FBI / DOJ authoritarian shills in this thread just give up?

The article at the justthenews link says, "Whistleblowers alleged that Thibault concealed the partisan nature of evidence from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland to secure their approval to open an investigation into former President Donald Trump in 2020 unrelated to the raid, according to information made public by Sen. Charles Grassley."

Where did the sentence "That investigation culminated in the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month." come from?

[Sonny Tufts]

Interesting information in the DOJ’s response to Trump’s motion for a Special Master. It seems the grand jury subpoena served on Trump’s representative in May requested not just classified documents, but all documents bearing classification markings. In June, the representative made a sworn certification to the DOJ that to the best of his knowledge a diligent search had been made and all documents responsive to the subpoena had been given to the DOJ and that no copy of any responsive document had been retained.

But there were documents at Mar-a-Lago that were responsive to the subpoena that weren’t produced. That is apparently what precipitated the search warrant.

It doesn’t matter whether the documents had been declassified; if they bore classification markings they should have been turned over. But they weren’t.

According to the DOJ filing, Trump’s so-called “diligent search” somehow failed to discover and turn over more than 100 documents with classification markings that the FBI discovered in a matter of hours, over twice the number of documents with classification markings that Trump’s people had weeks to discover and deliver.

The response can be read here: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/polit...ter/index.html

[donnay]

CONFIRMED: As Gateway Pundit Reported — FBI Doctored Mar-a-Lago Photo, Added Their Own Docs that DON’T MATCH INVENTORY REPORTS

By Jim Hoft
Published September 3, 2022 at 6:35pm



The FBI created a fake crime scene at Mar-a-Lago by adding their own documents to the scene and doctoring the photo they released in their report and to the press.

As The Gateway Pundit reported earlier — This is against the law.

The DOJ responded in a lawsuit this week to President Trump’s request to a Florida Court to review the FBI raid of his iconic property Mar-a-Lago.

In the DOJ’s response, the DOJ included a document they claim was taken at Mar-a-Lago during their raid.

The photo was all over the news on Wednesday, August 31, the day after it was provided to the court.

The Independent made fun of the Time Magazine cover on the right side of the photo that the DOJ apparently wanted to include in the photo so that they could show that President Trump is so vain. There was no need for this Time Magazine piece in the picture.

The Daily Mail said “Trump KEPT framed Time cover of ‘enemies’ knocking at his window among the collection of classified files – including documents marked ‘Top Secret’ and those based on ‘human intelligence’ – sprawled across Mar-a-Lago”.

This was all a lie. The FBI created the crime scene, inserted their own documents, and then photoshopped the document. What a disgrace.
1. We know that the FBI wanted to make this look like a crime scene.
We know this because at the bottom of the photo provided to the court there is the number 2A, indicating that this was a crime scene photo as well as a type of tape measure across the bottom of the photo. The corrupt FBI threw the photos on the floor themselves. They staged this.

We know this because the containers were right next door. The documents would have been placed on a table had the FBI wanted to take a picture of the documents. Showing them as scattered across the floor is for show to indicate they were found this way, a lie we explain below. Also, the cabinets are right next to the documents, which is likely where they were stored. They weren’t stored on the floor.



2. The FBI inserted documents into the photo.
The cover sheets in the above photo that were red, yellow, and brown were inserted by the FBI. They are the FBI’s cover sheets. We know this for various reasons. The Trump White House did not need these cover sheets in the documents they held because they had their own cover sheets.

If you look closely at the photo above, the document right above the 2A is folded back. The papers are stapled together as they should be. If you look at that batch you see there already was a cover sheet on that document. It says “Please store in…”. That is the real cover sheet.

The red, yellow, and brown cover sheets were inserted. If you look closely at the yellow cover sheets, they are paper clipped to the documents. The documents would have been stapled. They are paperclipped because they were inserted by the FBI.

Also, the front cover sheet in brown, showing SCI, says the following wording:

Handling, storage, reproduction, and distribution of the attached document must be in accordance with the applicable executive orders statutes and agency implementing regulations.

Continued...

[Matt Collins]

[Brian4Liberty]

My takeaway from that: The President has the constitutional authority to classify or declassify anything he wants. But everyone else in government can ignore him, and thus he really doesn't have any authority. That is the case they are making.

Trump: I want steak for dinner!

Waiter: Yes, sir!

DOJ: Trump did not get steak for dinner that night. Maybe the waiter didn't take his order to the kitchen, maybe the cook didn't want to cook it. Maybe they ran out of steak. Maybe they cooked the steak, but a dog grabbed it and ran away. Regardless, there was no steak that night, thus Trump did not really, truly, and legally order steak.

[ClaytonB]

This video is very instructive. Timestamp @3:35 contains the crux of their bull$#@! argument -- they are trying to conflate POTUS, who is the embodiment and personification of the Executive branch, with an "original classifier", which is just a Federal office designated by POTUS as a classifying authority. The key phrase is "This includes the President". And that's the constitutional battle that has to be fought here. Executive privilege inheres in the individual, not the office. It is true that executive privilege does not extend beyond the term of the presidency, but all of the information pertaining to POTUS's activities, for the duration of their presidency, is privileged executive information and does not stop being privileged executive information after the term of the presidency.

For the blockheaded Wokists out there, the simple litmus test is to ask yourself whether (a) the information in question is something that POTUS had legitimate access to during their presidency, and (b) POTUS could be "made to forget" this information upon leaving office. In the case of (a), POTUS has automatic and unrestricted access to all information in the Executive; and in the case of (b) if you want to assert that some particular document "could not be declassified upon leaving office", you must explain how the information is to be extracted from POTUS's brain since he can simply read the document one minute before leaving office and write down what he read one minute after leaving office.

This idea of trying to make POTUS into "just another Federal employee" who happens to be in charge of all the Federal employees in the Executive is the core constitutional argument here. POTUS is the check-and-balance of the Executive, imbued in a single, solitary individual. And that is by design. The Judiciary is 9 people, the Legislative 535 and the Executive is 1. This is a blatant attempt to create some kind of "zombie POTUS" that is permanently attached to the puppet-strings of the very bureaucracy which he is supposed to be the executive of. Pure insanity.