Daily Broadside | Garland Owns Raid Decision, FBI Too Corrupt to Exist Any Longer

Daily Verse | Isaiah 66:2
“These is the one I esteem:
    he who is humble and contrite in spirit,
    and trembles at my word.”

Friday’s Reading: Jeremiah 1-3
Saturday’s Reading: Jeremiah 4-6

Friday and we’re already hitting the middle of August. The days are hurtling by on the road to November and our last chance to right the ship before 2024.

So Attorney General Merrick Garland made a rare statement yesterday and took responsibility for approving the raid on President Trump’s personal residence on Monday.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said he “personally approved” the decision to seek a search warrant for former President Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago, saying the Justice Department has filed a motion to unseal the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI’s raid, amid “substantial public interest” in the matter, while defending the “integrity” of law enforcement officials.

The raid was outrageous not just for its brazen disregard of historical precedent, or for the reported purpose of recovering potentially “classified” materials that Trump had (even though the FBI had already seen everything that he had), or even for the overkill of sending 40 agents to swarm Trump’s home.

No, the real outrage is in the selective application of enforcement and the absolutely appalling corruption that exists in agencies like the FBI, putting the lie to Garland’s defense of the “integrity” of the agency. The FBI in particular and our law enforcement institutions in general have become much too large, much to unaccountable, and much too smug.

They are a danger to the republic.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, once so popular it had its own TV show solely dedicated to its heroics, has become a hyper-politicized, jackbooted bully that no longer serves the American people or the U.S. Constitution, which its employees are sworn to protect. It has become, instead, the intelligence arm and domestic enforcer of the far left.

Did we say defund? Yes. But we don’t mean simply to cut its funding, as leftists have disastrously proposed for police forces across the country. We mean tear down the entire rotting edifice of the FBI and replacing it with a new agency that respects the Constitution and holds itself accountable to all Americans, not just the woke far left.

The Editorial Board of Issues & Insights isn’t the only group calling for a complete dismantling of the FBI. See Kyle Shideler’s recent essay at American Greatness, “For the Rule of Law to Reign, the Bureau Must Be Destroyed.”

Nevertheless, the FBI must be abolished.

The solution to the abuses we now endure is not just to subject the FBI to another fruitless inspector general investigation but to dismantle it completely. The bureau cannot be the focus of yet another congressional hearing. FBI Director Christopher Wray, like his predecessors, is more than happy to sit smirking while a handful of grandstanding congressmen and senators pound the table and yell on C-SPAN. Then he’ll jet off for a holiday vacation on a taxpayer-funded private jet while the same congressmen vote to increase his budget. Again.

No, the FBI must be rendered into component parts and distributed to the four winds…

…The FBI’s actions over the past six years make perfectly clear that the FBI is more than willing to serve as the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party. It serves as its patron’s shield in matters large and small. It exonerated Hillary Clinton for her illicit server. It raided James O’Keefe and Project Veritas when Joe Biden’s daughter lost her diary. It eliminated investigation into Black Lives Matter and other black identity extremists because those pursuits annoyed the Democrats’ Congressional Black Caucus. It refuses even to utter the word “Antifa” while churches and pregnancy centers are fire-bombed. It continues to cover up for Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings with enemy nations, along with his indulgence in criminal prostitution and drug abuse.

But the FBI has also served as the Democrats’ sword as well. It knowingly laundered the Russian collusion hoax, lying in order to secure FISA warrants. It ambushed the president’s sitting national security advisor in a nonsense perjury trap. The FBI hunts down January 6 protesters while dodging congressional inquiries about the role of federal agents in provoking the incident. The FBI ginned up a fake kidnapping plot in Michigan to instill fear of right-wing terrorism, manhandled the former president’s lawyer, and shackled one of his former high-level aides.

And it has now raided the former president’s home under a mere pretext, while the Democrats openly crow on cable news about using a political prosecution to prevent Trump from ever again being able to serve in office.

That’s what makes the raid on Trump so impossibly outrageous: the flagrant double standard the FBI and any number of other agencies flaunt in our faces. They don’t even pretend to be impartial and even-handed. In fact, they seem to revel in the fact that they’re only serving one team.

It’s been going on for years.

Did former president Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, who stuffed documents down his pants and in his socks, walked out of the National Archives with them, and lied about doing so, get raided by the FBI to recover any other potentially “classified” materials? No, he got fined and two years’ probation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.

Unlike Berger, Trump was the president, the chief executive and, as such, could declassify any documents he wanted. But the FBI decides to raid his home.

Victor Davis Hanson, one of my favorite essayists, puts it just as bluntly as the others:

The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  

Take the FBI’s deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. This week the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump—an historical first. 

A massive phalanx of FBI agents swooped into the Trump residence while he was not home, to confiscate his personal property, safe, and records. All of this was over an archival dispute of presidential papers common to many former presidents. Agents swarmed the entire house, including the wardrobe closet of the former first lady. 

Note we are less than 90 days out from a midterm election, and this was not just a raid, but a political act. 

An October surprise in August. I wonder what they have planned for October?

The FBI interferes with and warps national elections. It hires complete frauds as informants who are far worse than its targets. It humiliates or exempts government and elected officials based on their politics. It violates the civil liberties of individual American citizens. 

The FBI’s highest officials now routinely mislead Congress. They have erased or altered court and subpoenaed evidence. They illegally leak confidential material to the media. And they have lied under oath to federal investigators.

It’s time to dismantle the FBI, tear out the studs, dig up the foundation and salt the earth where it once stood. There is no reforming it.

And Trump may be just the guy to do it because, well … this, which he and his team released the day after the raid.

Have a good weekend.

Daily Broadside | Our Only Option is to Go Scorched Earth on the Democrats in 2022 and 2024

Daily Verse | Isaiah 58:4
You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.

Wednesday’s Reading: Isaiah 60-62

Wednesday and the audacious attack on Trump under the flimsiest of legal cover in our multi-tiered system of justice continues to astound and shock. Any illusions that America as founded still exists was shattered with this latest in-your-face jackbooted stomping of precedent and the rule of law.

How anyone can still believe we’re not at least approaching DEFCON 3 is beyond me. If sabotaging 2016’s election results with the Russia! Russia! Russia! collusion hoax, the two counterfeit impeachment trials, the rigged and stolen election of 2020, the January 6 Reichstag fire and illegal sham trials haven’t convinced you that unconstitutional covert operations designed to short-circuit our liberties are being run out of formerly trusted institutions, I’m not sure what will.

What makes this even worse is who hasn’t been raided by the DOJ and its mini me, the FBI.

Hunter Biden and Joe Biden: The FBI has been in possession of Hunter’s laptop since 2019, which contains evidence that Hunter used Joe’s position to conduct lucrative foreign business. He also cut his dad into deals and commingled their funds.

Hillary Clinton: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information on a private server she likely used to hide efforts to use her office to raise money for her family’s foundation. She was infamously excused by the FBI…

Black Lives Matter: Amid evidence that the left-wing group has been abusing its charitable status, even liberal states issued warnings to the group. But though the movement’s scope is nationwide, the FBI or DOJ have yet to do anything about it…

By contrast, Trump allies past and present — such as Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Peter Navarro, and others — have been subjected to spectacular raids, often leaked to friendly media ahead of time, over relatively minor or unrelated allegations.

I’ve warned for years now that we were heading toward Civil War 2.0. The unprecedented invasion of a former president’s and most likely future presidential candidate’s and current private citizen’s home on the pretext of searching for “classified” documents from his time as president pushes us a great deal further toward that eventuality.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that was part of the calculus involved in planning the raid. The great danger is that some far-right activists or MEAL Team 6-types will take the provocation as permission to plot a counterattack. But as one of my favorite bloggers and pastors, Douglas Wilson, wrote in a discussion about this very thing,

“And so the takeaway lesson for conservatives is: don’t take the bait. Under no circumstances should we take the bait. I think I may have mentioned before that we should not take the bait.”

You should read the whole thing and you should also not take the bait. So should the extremes on the Right.

What we can do is really the only thing legally permissible right now, and that is to vote out the grifting ankle-biting dead weights who are part of the problem, who say they’re Republicans but act like Democrats. People like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and any of the 14 House Republicans and 15 Senate Republicans who voted to interfere with our Second Amendment right to bear arms because teenage criminals don’t obey our laws.

Fortunately, voting them out that seems to be happening, especially in races with Trump-endorsed candidates.

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.), one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump last year, has conceded in her tough primary contest against Joe Kent. Kent is a Green Beret endorsed by the former president and is expected to advance in Washington state’s all-party primary…

Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, would be the third such House Republican to lose in a primary this year, joining Rep. Peter Meijer (Mich.), who was defeated last week and, Rep. Tom Rice (S.C.), who lost last month. Two Republicans have advanced — both from all-party primaries: Rep. Dan Newhouse (Wash.) and Rep. David G. Valadao (Calif.). Four others decided not to seek reelection.

The final House Republican to face a primary is Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who will go before voters Aug. 16. She faces a challenger running to her right who is backed by Trump.

I don’t believe that we can simply vote our way out of this but, apart from the unmentionable, it’s the only option we have right now. To some degree, it’s being effective. And at least one observer thinks the Deep State’s days are numbered:

But even if the Deep State were to succeed, they have already burnt their bridges by creating this precedent. The path is now wide open for either a returning President Trump or a newly minted President DeSantis to investigate Joe “The Big Guy” Biden and his possible history of pay for play. What a rich target, given Hunter’s lack of discretion about how the family became so wealthy on a government salary. Ditto for Nancy “I Rip Up State of the Union Addresses” Pelosi, the most amazing investor in stock market history. And what about those sexual harassment charges against old Joe?  No more “let the defeated opposition party leave town in peace” after they lose an election. When you play this high-stakes game, you had better come with very clean hands. While Trump may have been too much of a Mr. Nice Guy when it came to prosecuting his opponents, Gov. DeSantis can play hardball with the best of them.

Couple that with the ascendancy of conservative lawmakers and you have the makings of a tool that can be used to pry the shadow government out of its hole. And then whack it over the head.

The Democrats have demonized half the country’s voters for the last decade or more, with Barack Hussein Obama starting the practice with his “bitter clingers” epithet, followed by Hillary’s “deplorables” comment, and Brandon’s “dregs of society” insult. We’ve suffered their slights with patience, believing (perhaps naively) that we’d eventually have our say.

It could be coming, starting with the mid-terms and following it up with a strong showing in 2024. But the victories must be decisive and overwhelming. They must absolutely wreck the Democrat Party of Soviet Suck-ups. And we must put people in place who are willing to go scorched earth on those players and organizations that have acted like the tyrants they are.

After the raid at his home, Trump posted a video that captures what a majority of us are probably feeling.

I’ll leave Paula Bolyard with the final word.

Now that we see clearly what the problem is, where do we go from here? Sure, we can peacefully protest, send angry emails, or post diatribes on social media, but that’s not going to fix the problems that are eating away at our republic. The answer lies in winning elections. Decisively. First the midterms and then the White House in 2024. As I wrote last week, Trump did the country a great service by exposing the deep state and making Americans aware of the corruption within our government. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to drain the swamp — in part because it was constantly investigating him. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week dropped a political bomb on the ruling class by suspending woke Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren, who had announced he would refuse to enforce Florida laws he didn’t like. Once we regain control of the White House and Congress, this should be our template going forward.