Former President Donald Trump described Monday’s FBI search of his Florida home Mar-a-Lago as proof that federal law enforcement is intent on “political persecution.”
It wouldn’t be the first time the feds went too far out a misplaced sense of its righteousness.
Exhibit No. 1: Carter Page, volunteer national security adviser to the Trump campaign.
After Trump clinched the GOP nod for president, then FBI director James Comey authorized a probe, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, based on misinformation in the bogus Steele “dossier” that alleged Russian collusion with Trump’s presidential campaign.
The FBI quickly obtained authorization to surveille Page, founder of Global Energy Management, also based on the dirty “dossier.” News reports about the FBI probe changed Page’s life forever. He is suing the DOJ, the FBI and former director James Comey for $75 million.
Exhibit No.2: Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Twice Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI about a December 2016 talk with a Russian diplomat. At the time, news articles reported could be a violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from conducting freelance foreign policy but has never been used to put someone in jail.
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Former Attorney General Bill Barr later wrote in “One Damn Thing After Another,” instead of “having a legitimate investigative purpose,” the FBI apparently talked to Flynn in order “to manufacture a crime – or at least something that could be superficially alleged to be a crime.”
Trump pardoned Flynn.
Exhibit No. 3: Super-rich sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, a truly bad guy, yet for years, he wasn’t on the lawman radar. It took a Trump hook to put him in the crosshairs.
The hook: Trump appointed Alex Acosta to be his Labor Secretary.
Acosta, a former federal prosecutor, is the only prosecutor to put Epstein behind bars under a 2008 plea deal that included a 13-month jail sentence and required Epstein to register as a sex offender.
For nearly a decade, the Miami Herald didn’t see anything newsworthy in the sentence – probably the harshest deal Acosta could have cut -- until there was a Trump angle. Suddenly, Epstein’s freedom was an outrage.
Then U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of the Southern District of New York charged Epstein with two counts of sexual trafficking between 2002 and 2005. The timeline supports Acosta’s claim that New York could have charged Epstein earlier because the Acosta agreement only applied to Southern Florida.
(Even though Acosta was the only professional who successfully prosecuted Epstein, during the media feeding frenzy he apparently felt he had to resign.)
In 2019 as he awaited trail, Epstein was found dead in a New York jail; his death was officially ruled a suicide. If a partisan shot hadn’t moved the Miami Herald to look at the superrich convicted sex offender, he’d probably be free and alive today.
Let me be clear. I’m not saying that the FBI had no cause to search Mar-a-Lago, because I do not know that is the case.
But when Trump says the search of Mar-a-Lago was political, recent history is on his side.
Debra J. Saunders is a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.
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