Trump raid should be Garland’s opening act

We now know that the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have an active interest in Donald Trump because Trump told us so.
“My beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a rambling statement. “They even broke into my safe!”
It’s not entirely clear why the FBI targeted Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who was not there, predictably characterised the search as a Democratic hit job. But the feds were apparently searching for classified records Trump stashed in Palm Beach after leaving the White House. He has already returned some files that the National Archives said belonged to the government, but Bloomberg News and the New York Times reported that the raid was focused on records he might have kept.
Theft of government records is the least of Trump’s legal worries, however. Attorney General Merrick Garland appears to be finally bringing the full weight of federal law enforcement to bear on the former president. Depending on how aggressively Garland pursues Trump for the attempted coup that he and his co-conspirators tried to engineer after he lost the 2020 presidential election, the list of criminal charges could include seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the US and obstruction of official proceedings.
Garland’s choices in the months ahead will have momentous consequences. His correct course of action would be to demonstrate that no president is above the law and indict Trump. As the January 6 committee hearings have already demonstrated, Trump and his team were awash in crimes — including creating slates of false electors to be used in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential vote and pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to withhold certification of the 2020 election. The Justice Department has convened a grand jury to investigate both of those efforts.
Trump also incited the violent insurrection that took place on January 6, and he did nothing to stop a mob he knew to be armed until after it stormed the Capitol, endangering federal legislators and the police protecting them. He has shown little remorse for the damage he set in motion before, during and after January 6, and his statement about the Mar-a-Lago raid was littered with unhinged distractions his political base will lap up.
“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponisation of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections,” he noted. “Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries.”
Trump’s pied pipers at Fox News devoured his talking points. “This is some Third World bullshit,” one of the network’s propagandists, Dan Bongino, said of the Mar-a-Lago raid. Trumpistas in the House of Representatives also fell into line, likening the FBI search to “weaponisation” of federal investigations. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the FBI’s actions reminded him of something that might happen in a “ Banana Republic.”
The FBI’s search, and the broader effort to hold Trump accountable, are anything but that, of course. FBI agents don’t get to waltz into a former president’s home and execute a search warrant unless a federal judge has already reviewed the warrant and approved it.

—Bloomberg