Mar-A-Lago

 

We're about 6 weeks out from the FBI raid on the Presidential dwelling on Florida's Atlantic coast, and it may be that all the dust that's going to settle — or most of it, anyway — has already done so.  Time to opine.

What we have here, net, are employees of the Executive Branch claiming the power to overrule their boss, the Chief Executive of the United States, the President.  Yes, we're dealing here with a former President who no longer has the authority to classify or declassify, but who once did.  Those employees of the Executive Branch now hold that any declassifications that happened on the former President's watch reverted to the status quo ante as of January 20th, 2021.  That's nonsense.

The Supreme Court has already come down on this issue in Navy v. Egan, and they were quite clear that the Constitution vests an elected President with far-ranging power over the classification status of both documents and persons.

"But," you object, "aren't there rules and procedures surrounding that topic?"  Yes, there are, and employees of the Executive Branch are required, as a condition of employment, to adhere to them.

The President, however, is not 'an employee of the Executive Branch'.  The President is the Executive.  The voters did that.  The Executive Branch exists to carry out the policies of the Chief Executive.  The Constitution did that.

The net effect, the 'takeaway' from all this, is that the President sets the rules, and everyone else follows the rules.  Because of that (in SCOTUS' words) 'Constitutional investment' of the President, it is a legal impossibility for any President, current or former, to be in possession of classified documents that existed at the end of that President's term of office.  The simple act of removing such from the White House ipso facto declassifies them.

It's also worth noting that the originals remain in the place where they were created, and only copies are distributed.  If a document required a Presidential signature, it is returned to its origin point after signing.  Therefore, Trump did not have any originals at Mar-A-Lago.  They were all copies, with the originals still residing in their permanent home.  The FBI wasn't there to reacquire irreplaceable fragments of American History.  They were there to deprive Trump of declassified documents that, absent some bizarre legal contortions, he was entitled to possess.  This seems intuitively obvious despite certain judges deciding that "separation of powers" doesn't really apply here.

In any case, Obama still has a warehouse full (really!) of documents he took with him on January 20th 2017, and there hasn't been any effort at all to reacquire those.  If the FBI were to apply whatever rules they're using here evenly across the board, there wouldn't be any such thing as 'a Presidential library'.  Why are the documents in Trump's possession so important that they can't be allowed into the Trump Presidential Library?  There are very few categories that plausibly fit the behavior we watched last August 8th.  Even voicing any of them risks being branded as a 'conspiracy theorist'.

The difference between 'conspiracy theory' and 'breaking news' is now about three weeks.  Pundits have already started suggesting that what the FBI wanted from Mar-A-Lago were documents related to the FBI's (active) involvement in the Russian Collusion accusations, documents that would prove the FBI to be irreparably corrupt.

Hell, who needs documents for that?

—==+++==—

Update July 15, 2024:  Judge Aileen Cannon today dismissed the Mar-A-Lago Documents case on the grounds that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith was appointed in violation of the Constitution's Appointments clause and its Appropriations clause.  Case Closed.

 

Strike Two

 

For six years now, the Democrats, the mainstream media, and the federal legal mechanisms (DOJ/FBI/others) have been hounding Donald Trump.  The obvious goal is to render Trump legally incapable of mounting another Presidential campaign.

Yet, we're assured that Trump was soundly defeated in 2020.  Literally every talking head, even those one might expect to be opposed to that cabal (DNC, media, and Deep State) use terms like "disgraced former President" or "debunked claims about the election".  We non-talking heads are faced with a most unhappy dichotomy:  either that last election was stolen or 81 million American voters thought it was a great idea to put an Alzheimer's sufferer in the White House.  One of those must be true, and I flinch from coming down on one side or the other.  They're both horrible options.  Whichever one chooses to believe, it's a losing move.

With each passing day, it becomes harder to deny that Trump is setting himself up for another run at the White House, and with each passing day, the Democrats' unbroken streak of unforced errors make it look more and more likely that Trump, if he runs, will win. The man still has enough juice to pack stadiums to overflowing.  As with the last election, the Dems are happy when the crowd amounts to 400.

Of course, the GOPe isn't too happy about that prospect, but they could find themselves holding a losing hand if a substantial number of Trump-backed newcomers win their elections this November.  Certainly, there aren't enough of those committed Trumpists to take over either the House or the Senate against the entrenched Never Trumpers, even combined with those already seated, but a big enough 'red wave' would send a very uncomfortable message to the rest:  get on board the train or be left at the station.

I've never been a Trump supporter.  I didn't vote for him in either 2016 0r 2020, and it's unlikely I will in 2024.  I absolutely reject the notion of voting for Republicans so that Democrats don't win.  In contests past, it has been hard to press the argument that the parties are sufficiently different that voting for one or the other is a sensible choice.  Last Thursday, Joe Biden put that notion to the torch.  True, both parties are corrupt as the natural end-game of such things must go, but the corruption of the Democrats is of a starkly different nature.  They seem to have gone full-totalitarian.  The only plausible counter-move is Sherman's March To The Sea.

The myriad federal agencies, nearly all of them Constitutionally insupportible, are the headquarters of what is commonly known as 'the deep state':  hordes of Civil Service hangers-on impossible to fire, yet most of them must be mothballed if the deep state is to be defanged.  The only way to do that is to defund them.  Luckily, this is not an impossible task as long as at least one house of Congress is held by a committed majority.

Deny the 'continuing resolution' that has been used for the last 15 years to avoid the (Constitutional) necessity for passing a budget.  No more Mr. Nice Guy.  Cut the budget.  Cut the budget so deep that Harry Browne would have gasped and reached for his nitroglycerine.  Pentagon -85%.  Any TLA not mentioned in Article 1 § 8 -100%. — I here mean FBI, CIA, and NSA.  Any TLA sanctioned by I§8 cut by enough that the top 4 management levels have to work for free in order to actually fulfill the agency's Constitutional mission — there are precious few of those.

Will this happen?  I sincerely doubt it.  Nobody either in office or contending for one has that much courage.

If it doesn't happen, of course, we're probably doomed to a very, very dirty hot civil war for which I'm certain I don't have enough ammunition.