What Is Really Unprecedented Is Trump's Criminality. The Republican outrage is telling.

[Nevilledog]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/08/fbi-raid-isnt-unprecedented-trumps-criminality-is.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/ZNfLF

In response to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, as is often the case, the revealing statements in the Republican Party come not from the fringe actors calling for civil war or defunding the FBI but the respectable statesmen in the mainstream. “No former President of the United States has ever been subject to a raid of their personal residence in American history,” complains Mike Pence on Twitter. “The idea that a law enforcement organization under a sitting president would raid the home of his predecessor, opponent in the previous election, and potential opponent in the next election, has no close parallel in American history,” editorializes National Review.

While it is factually true that there is no history of a former American president being raided by the Feds, these observations implicitly treat the FBI’s behavior as the source of the historical break. The reason Donald Trump is the first former president to be treated like a criminal is that he is the first former president who is a criminal.

We don’t know what evidence the FBI may have obtained when it went searching for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Not even his most delusional acolytes doubt he repeatedly and flagrantly violated the Presidential Records Act by bringing boxes full of White House material to Florida. It’s entirely possible this will be the only offense that led to or is uncovered by the raid.

The Republican view of this has always been that record-keeping protocols by high-ranking members of the executive branch are matters of the utmost seriousness and that violations of it ought to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. National Review treated the FBI’s preelection announcement of an investigation into Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information with her emails, not as a case of FBI abuse but as a devastating indictment of Clinton, and it was still publishing stories two years later insisting she ought to have been criminally charged. Of course, those anti-Clinton arguments have always been bad. It would be wrong for Attorney General Merrick Garland to adopt the conservative movement’s rigid and unprincipled 2016 position and apply it to Trump.

*snip*

[malaise]

1. Someone should tell the hacks at M$Greedia

Their coverage is sickening with some strange creatures coming out of the woodwork screaming politics.
Enough of this fuckery!

[SharonClark]

3. For a couple of hours most of what MSNBC hysterically reported was how upset the GQPers

are about how "political" it is. It seems to have settled down a bit now.

[D_Master81]

2. It really is sick

Now you’re a martyr of the Republican Party if you’re investigated for criminal behavior. But this is what you get with 35 years of right wing lies and propaganda flowing like an open sewer. People truly do believe their victims at every turn.

[SergeStorms]

4. Wish I could rec this a million times.

Yes, what is unprecedented is Trump's criminality!

That's the freaking headline. Not how Democrats are picking on him, but what a lowlife scumbag he is.

[Metaphorical]

5. I love it when facts expose hypocrites

The irony of the last few days is likely lost on the average MAGAt (which, arguably, is a big part of the problem). The shibboleth about classified documents arguably cost Hillary Clinton her chance at the presidency. Every chant of Lock Her Up was predicated upon the assumption that she couldn't be trusted with National Security secrets, and that despite nine investigations, not one resulted in a shred of evidence that she had actually done anything wrong.

The Republicans are perfectly fine with the Imperial Presidency, so long as it's THEIR president. This of course exposes the bigger lie - that only Republicans deserve representation. That's not a viable solution for the rest of us.