More reflections on the Mar-A-Lago raid: Trump as an illegitimate president

The New Neo Posted on by

One thing the Mar-A-Lago raid has driven home is that the left truly believes – and they think much of the general public will agree – that what ordinarily would be allowed most presidents and ex-presidents is not to be allowed to Trump. That is because they think and have always thought that he was an illegitimate president with no right to hold that office.

It doesn’t matter which reasoning they use to explain that point of view: he’s too uncouth, he’s stupid, he’s a clown, he’s beneath us, he’s a Russian puppet, he’s a racist, he wears a MAGA hat, he didn’t get the popular vote, Russian disinformation enabled his win – the bottom line is that they think he wasn’t a real president and shouldn’t be treated as one.

He has possession of classified documents? Indict him under an act that is virtually never used as a criminal statute (except in rare cases, and then involving a misdemeanor), and absolutely never used against a president or ex-president – because he really wasn’t a real president and therefore he’s not a real ex-president either.

Spy on him. Lie about him. Frame him. Shame him. Do whatever is necessary.

Get a search warrant so general that it allows you to search his entire residence and confiscate every bit of paper you find that has anything to do with his bogus non-presidential “presidential” years. Probable cause? Don’t tell the American people what you cited as the probable cause, because the probable cause is actually that the illegitimate Trump deserves no respect and deserves everything bad that’s coming to him.

And they know that half of America will agree and applaud them.

Oh, and the goal was never to get the documents for the documents’ sake. They knew the documents were not at all at risk. The goal was to get evidence to get Trump, period. What was it Schumer said? Oh yeah – and he said it seventeen days before Trump’s inauguration:

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Is there any doubt whatsoever that the Mar-A-Lago raid is that intelligence community (and the left) “getting back” at Trump, for the umpteenth time?

Just to take one example of the attitude being expressed by the left, this is from Yahoo News:

One factor that McCord (Mary McCord, national security lawyer under Obama) suggested would be on the minds of DOJ national security lawyers is what Trump might have done with the highly classified material that was still believed to be at Mar-a-Lago. “Are we worried that some of this information would actually be shared outside of Mar-a-Lago, potentially with foreign adversaries? I’d be really concerned about that,” she said.

Yes, we all know how soft Trump was on our foreign adversaries, as opposed to previous tough-guy Obama and current tough-guy Biden. The left keeps peddling this preposterous dreck, the MSM keeps dutifully and uncritically spinning it back to the public, and half the country nods and says, “Yes, that’s just what he was probably going to do.”

On this blog, commenter “Greg Hlatky” remarked:

You are watching the Ruling Class lose its collective mind over a man who has not been in office for more than a year and a half, didn’t take his salary when President and likely isn’t drawing a pension. Unless Trump is just a MacGuffin.

Trump isn’t just a MacGuffin, but he is at least partly a symbol. Sarah Palin was a similar symbol before him, but because she never was elected VP, the focus on her faded. Trump would have faded, too, if he had lost the 2016 election. His winning and becoming president was the outrage that cannot be forgiven, ever. They could not believe it happened, and they think he must be prevented from ever winning again or ever taking a position of any kind of political power.

Not just Trump, though; any Republican who isn’t part of the genteel NeverTrumper club must never take power. Any Republican who might really be serious about stopping them and especially about draining the so-called swamp cannot have any power. It is a deadly serious game and they are determined to win.

Trump himself said, and he was correct: “They’re not after me, they’re after you – I’m just in the way.”

More on the security failure at the Chautauqua Institution where Rushdie was stabbed

The New Neo Posted on by

When I heard of the attack, I immediately wondered about security there, because everyone knows – and has known for over thirty years – that a significant number of radical Muslims with Iranian sympathies are out to kill Rushdie. Therefore heightened security is not optional; it’s necessary.

But if this report is true, the venue lacked even some of the most basic security. According to anonymous sources:

The institution’s leadership had rejected recommendations for basic security measures, including bag checks and metal detectors, fearing that would create a divide between speakers and the audience, according to two sources who spoke with CNN. The leadership also feared that it would change the culture at the institution, the sources said…

The two sources have direct knowledge of the security situation at the Chautauqua Institution and past recommendations and spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly…

There were no security searches or metal detectors at the event, a person who witnessed the attack told CNN. The witness is not being identified because they expressed concerns for their personal safety…

“We assess for every event what we think the appropriate security level is, and this one was certainly one that we thought was important which is why we had a State Trooper and Sheriff presence there,” [Institution President] Hill said.

If fear of “changing the culture at the institution” was really their concern and the reason for the lax security, it certainly backfired, didn’t it? Denial of reality is not a good approach, and a single State Trooper and Sheriff are unlikely to be able to do much if the attacker is quick (this one was very quick indeed, by all reports) and if there are no metal detectors or inspection of backpacks and bags.

I suspect that the Rushdie attack has already “changed the culture” of the institution very significantly.

The suspect in the Rushdie attack is ID’ed [scroll down for UPDATE]

The New Neo Posted on by

And surprise surprise surprise:

The man arrested in Friday’s stabbing of famed novelist Salman Rushdie was identified by police as a New Jersey man, who law enforcement sources tell The Post he had sympathies toward the Iranian government that has called for Rushdie’s death.

Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was arrested after he stormed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York and allegedly stabbed the author multiple times, New York State Police said Friday.

Law enforcement sources told The Post that an initial investigation suggests Matar has made social media posts in support of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard, and in support of Shi’a extremism more broadly.

New York State Police, however, said that Matar’s motive remained unclear.

Those New York State Police, always making with the jokes. Motive unclear? I realize they have to be very careful, but come on.

They also say he acted alone.

If you call decades of fatwas and exhortations to kill Rushdie “alone.”

There’s also this:

Regardless, the attack comes amid a slew of foiled Iranian plots on American soil, including a plot against former National Security Advisor John Bolton and an apparent attempt on the life of an Iranian-American journalist in Brooklyn.

Of course, one always has to be wary of foiled plots like the one about killing Bolton, because of what we know about entrapment. And sure enough, an agent was involved, but in the Bolton case from what we’ve learned so far, entrapment does not seem to have been involved:

Prosecutors alleged that in October 2021, Poursafi [a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] contacted a person online, seeking someone to take photographs of Bolton for a supposed book project.

The U.S. contact, identified in court documents as “Individual A,” connected Poursafi with an associate who served as a confidential source for U.S. authorities.

Beginning in early November 2021 and continuing through April 2022, according to prosecutors, Poursafi discussed the plot with the source, offering $250,000 to “eliminate” the former national security official – an amount “negotiated up” to $300,000.

Poursafi allegedly related that he had another “job” for the source that would pay $1 million.

According to court documents, the source asked Poursafi’s help locating Bolton, and the Iranian operative provided Bolton’s work address in Washington.

A search of Poursafi’s online accounts revealed “screenshots of a map application showing a street view of the former national security advisor’s office,” according to court documents. Attached to a screenshot was a note that Poursafi was communicating from Tehran, Iran.

“Poursafi told the (source) that it did not matter how the murder was carried out, but his ‘group’ would require video confirmation of the target’s death,” prosecutors said.

More at the link, and it really doesn’t seem like entrapment was an issue there.

Hadi Matar certainly might have acted alone, but I think it’s a bit premature to say that he actually did.

UPDATE 8:55 PM:

First report on Rushdie’s injuries:

“The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie [Rushdie’s agent] wrote in an emailed update. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”

Brutal and horrible, but it sounds survivable.

I had earlier suggested that security might have been lax, especially considering that Rushdie is always at risk of assassination, even after all this time. There’s apparently still a $4 million bounty on his head (does the perp get half that for effort?). Here’s more on security:

The lecture hall where Rushdie was stabbed had at least historically featured middling security measures, a former employee of the Chautauqua Institution, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said in an interview on Friday.

Bags were allowed, the employee told The Daily Beast, which they claimed had concerned staffers at the institute as high-profile speakers like Rushdie frequently visit.

In a brief phone call, the Chautauqua Institution told The Daily Beast: “We are dealing with an emergency at this time and have no further comment or information to provide.”

Did Rushdie have his own security? I don’t know, but even if he did, it was clearly inadequate. My guess is that the perp, who lives in New Jersey, researched where Rushdie was going to be speaking and may have discovered that Chautauqua had security that might be the easiest to overcome.

By the way – although I doubt this has much of anything to do with anything, since the perp is not Hispanic – the name “Matar” means “to kill” in Spanish.

The warrant and the inventory

The New Neo Posted on by

William Jacobson writes this about the warrant and inventory:

The affidavits supporting the warrant have not been unsealed, and it’s unclear whether Trump would have a copy.

The inventory does not give any indication what the records were, other than that some were marked as having high classifications, such as:

2A – Various classified/TS/SCI documents
lOA – Miscellaneous Secret Documents
11A – Miscellanous Top Secret Documents
14-A – Miscellaneous Confidential Documents

What also is clear is this was a wholesale rummaging through Trump’s office. They even seized a lot of boxes of documents that had no classification markings…

Fishing expedition, of course. That was a foregone conclusion.

There’s a lot more information at the link, including quotes from that WSJ article I quoted earlier today in my previous post.

Also from Professor Jacobson, this is Trump, writing on Truth Social:

Number one, it was all declassified [by Trump]. Number two, they didn’t need to “seize” anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request…

…They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?

That last question is rhetorical, of course. Trump knows, you know, and I know, they did nothing about that; he was allowed to just give them back (NOTE: actually, they are apparently still in storage with NARA – has no one gone through them yet?), just as Hillary was allowed to do whatever she did with her server.

Obama doesn’t exist. Only Trump exists. And he must be stopped by any means necessary.

They say they found some classified information in the papers they took from Mar-A-Lago…

The New Neo Posted on by

Something like this raid would have to have been done with the utmost transparency and documentation, as well as objective observers, if it’s done at all. But none of that was present.

Here’s today’s news:

FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,” the outlet reported. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the ‘President of France,’ according to the three-page list. The list is contained in a seven-page document that also includes the warrant to search the premises which was granted by a federal magistrate judge in Florida.”

Plus, think about it: Trump was president for four years with access to all the classified information – about nuclear weapons and everything else – and nothing bad had ever happened as a result. Also, if he indeed had taken some papers of this type, and they were in his possession for the last one and a half years, what’s the big urgency right now? And why not just ask for them? Had they specifically asked and he refused? Is that documented? Were they not allowed to search last time they were there? Are they alleging the papers were hidden somewhere at the time – for example, in Melania’s clothing or a safe?

Are they going to allege he was going to give them to Russia, Russia, Russia, since we know he’s a Russian puppet?

This is reminding me, not for the first time, of the Dreyfus affair. No, Trump is not a Jewish army officer, and this is not France, and they didn’t publicly rip his epaulettes off – not yet, anyway. But Dreyfus was falsely accused and falsely convicted of selling military secrets to the Germans, and when it was becoming more clear that the accusations were false, the army forged evidence to implicate Dreyfus and protect its own reputation. The entire thing took twelve years to play out and intensely polarized France into pro and con sides, and made a lot of people in that country lose trust in previously-respected institutions.

Or perhaps they’re casting Trump as Julius Rosenberg, and they want to execute him? A few twitterati are hoping, anyway. After all, if you attack the king, you must kill him, right? Speaking of death penalties, New York’s Letitia James – who was elected on a platform to get Trump, among other things – may be looking for the “death penalty” for Trump’s New York business:

Former President Donald Trump may lose the “crown jewels” of the heir’s corporate empire if New York Attorney General Letitia James moves to invoke New York’s “corporate death penalty” against the Trump Organization, according to a new report.

On Wednesday, Trump announced he would refuse to answer questions in James’ civil investigation into the company during a deposition that lasted more than five hours.

The investigation focuses on whether the Trump Organization essentially kept two sets of books. He allegedly would low-ball values to avoid taxes, while high-balling values to secure loans.

“In the coming weeks or even days, the AG is expected to file a massive, long-threatened ‘enforcement action’ — essentially a multi-hundred-page lawsuit against the Trumps and his Manhattan-based business,” Business Insider reported Wednesday. “Fines and back taxes, however, may be the least of what Trump’s facing. James has signaled she will also seek the dissolution of the business itself under New York’s so-called corporate death penalty — a law that allows the AG to seek to dissolve businesses that operate ‘in a persistently fraudulent or illegal manner.’”

That article goes on to say that pleading the fifth in a civil case is considered evidence of guilt – as opposed to in a criminal case. Is that true? Not really; it’s complicated.

The only good thing about any of this is that the utter moral bankruptcy of Trump’s opponents has become clear, as well as the Orwellian hypocrisy of their rhetoric about defending democracy. It is democracy of which they are terrified, if it were to bring Trump to the presidency again and threaten their own power.

Also, the FBI or DOJ has has apparently leaked the information in the seized documents to the press. I guess the press now has a high-level security clearance. Or maybe the papers don’t mean a thing after all.

It also occurs to me that if the feds were left alone when they searched the premises last time, they could have planted documents then. Or of course, they could have planted them now. Is this a far-fetched thought? Not at all. They have already proven they will lie and deceive in order to implicate Trump. And naturally they also would ignore all of this if it weren’t Trump. If it involved a Democrat – say, Hillary Clinton – it would be just fine.

A little blog glitch…

The New Neo Posted on by

…happened for about an hour. Hope it’s settled now. It had to do with a plug-in problem and made it impossible for me to get to the blog.

I thought I’d take the opportunity to remind you that if the blog ever goes down for any significant amount of time, I’m still able to post (at least, so far) at the venerable old venue: https://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/ .

Right now everything is working here again, though.

Salman Rushdie stabbed

The New Neo Posted on by

He was about to give a lecture in upstate New York when a man ran up to the podium and stabbed him many times. We haven’t been told Rushdie’s condition, but apparently he is alive. The attacker is in custody, and we haven’t been told anything about him although we can certainly guess.

When I read the news, my first thought was, “Are we in a time warp?” I thought how long it’s been since the fatwa was issued by Khomeini against Rushdie (33 years), and that if the fatwa was the attacker’s motive – which is the obvious assumption till proven otherwise – how patient those who would carry it out. I wrote at some length in 2015 about the Rushdie fatwa, which had been officially issued in February of 1989 and established a duty on every Muslim to kill him – although the Iranian government has retreated from it in recent years. The fatwa included the requirement to kill anyone related to The Satanic Verses’ publication, as well, and one of Rushdie’s Japanese translators was murdered in 1991 because of it, and two other translators survived murder attempts.

With all of that background, I wonder how the attacker got into the venue with a knife. What kind of security does Rushdie have at this point? Originally he went into hiding for nine years, and in recent years he’s made appearances but I can’t imagine that anyone thought the threat was over. And yet someone was allowed into the lecture venue with a knife of some sort, and also was able to rush the stage. It puts me in mind of the killing of former Japanese prime minister Abe, or the would-be attack on Lee Zeldin, in which the attackers got very close to their targets.

Here’s hoping he survives.

Merrick Garland speaks

The New Neo Posted on by

And doesn’t say much, which is no surprise.

The most interesting thing he said – which is also no surprise, although it seemed to contradict the Newsweek story I wrote about earlier today – is that he personally approved the Mar-A-Lago raid.

Of course he did, as was already obvious. So I guess the “Christopher Wray did this on his own” story had a very brief shelf life.

Another thing Garland said was that copies of the warrant and the inventory “were provided to” Trump’s attorneys at the site (let’s assume that “provided to” means the more conventional given a copy of rather than merely shown a copy of). There had been conflicting reports earlier about whether the Trump forces had ultimately received those things, and some denials that they had. At any rate, all of it is sealed right now so my assumption is that until the documents are officially unsealed, they would not be allowed to reveal their contents anyway. Garland also said that the DOJ has asked the court to unseal them, but it seems to me that could have been done long before this if the DOJ had wanted to do so.

Garland spent a lot of his rather short speech testily defending the integrity and fairness of the FBI and the DOJ – ignoring the history of Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop coverup, the Flynn persecution, and a host of examples of politically-based differential justice in recent years. So that dog won’t hunt, and his feigned or real outrage about “recent unfounded [sic] attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department” convinces no one not already convinced. And it only adds to the contempt for Garland himself that he does not even acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of bias in these agencies.

Here are his remarks:

[ADDENDUM: Victor Davis Hanson on the “fairness” of the FBI.]

[ADDENDUM II: Here’s a succinct summary of Garland’s statement that I found in a comment at Legal Insurrection: “Yeah, we raided Trump, I OK’d it, and my FBI storm troopers are all boy scouts.”]

Something happened at a Russian air base

The New Neo Posted on by

And we don’t know how or why:

Russia’s Saki Air Base, safely tucked away 120 miles or more behind the front lines, lost as many as 10 warplanes and various buildings in a series of explosions on Tuesday — but how it happened remains a mystery…

Saki (sometimes spelled Saky) was thought to be unreachable by Ukraine’s missile forces, and it’s certainly too far behind the lines to get hit by Ukraine’s artillery.

But maybe the Ukrainians used this weapon? Or maybe a Russian screwup?:

…[T]he Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on August 9 that munitions had been detonated at a storage site at the airfield due to negligence, not an attack, and claimed that no aircraft were damaged. Russian milblogger Rybar claimed on August 10 that the explosion was likely not caused by a missile strike and hypothesized that the explosions could be due to negligence and non-compliance with safety regulations or to a small helicopter with a bomb attacking a nearby parking lot.

Clear as mud.

More Trump raid fallout: is there anyone on earth naive enough to believe the DOJ on this?

The New Neo Posted on by

From Newsweek:

The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek.

The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters…

So we can assume these are FBI and/or DOJ agents leaking this story. What portion of it is the truth is unknown, of course – after all, this is the FBI, folks. They lie to us; we don’t get to lie to them.

But either way – true or false – the disclosure of the “confidential human source” is almost as shocking as the Mar-A-Lago raid itself. If true, it means there’s a mole in Trump’s inner circle, perhaps planted, encouraged, and paid by the FBI. So yes, they’re still spying on him and now they’re bragging about it? I’m sure some people would be pleased with this, but only those who already hate him. I think even some of the mild haters or the lukewarm would feel uneasy about it, as it underlines the corrupt nature of the FBI as a modern-day Democrat spy agency.

And if false, why would the agents believe this would be a good cover story? Well, it explains how they got the information to obtain the search warrant, but its “unprecendented” nature is almost certainly offputting and frightening to quite a few people, including those who aren’t huge Trump supporters but who see that this is something that can happen to anyone who opposes the left, and even perhaps to them. It seems – to use a quaint phrase – un-American.

More:

FBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Justice Department official who is a 30-year veteran of the FBI.

Excuse me? If true, that’s one of the single stupidest calculations I’ve heard in quite some time. And if false, it’s a lie of transparent absurdity.

Next:

The effort to keep the raid low-key failed: instead, it prompted a furious response from GOP leaders and Trump supporters. “What a spectacular backfire,” says the Justice official.

Republicans pounce! Actually, it wasn’t and isn’t just Republicans. Are the DOJ and FBI so dense and out of touch they didn’t see the backlash coming, or is this just more blah blah BS meant to fool no one?

And this next paragraph is theater of the absurd:

“I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action,” the official says. “They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite.”

Is he or she joking? Tweaking and teasing us with statements so ludicrous a child would find them laughable? I know that the Soviet used to do that and perhaps that’s the point here – to tell us the most prepostorous lies as a sort of mockery. But in case the agencies were truly that clueless, let me just say that it is glaringly obvious to all but the most partisan hacks that this is a political operation and not a “routine law enforcement action,” if only for the simple reason that nothing of the sort has ever happened before to a former president and possible/probably future presidential nominee and opponent of the current administration.

Next:

“They were seeking to avoid any media circus,” says the second source, a senior intelligence official who was briefed on the investigation and the operation. “So even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout.”

One and a half years those documents were sitting there without being destroyed, the government had paid a visit and looked at them already, Trump’s lawyers were cooperating, Trump wasn’t even home, and suddenly there’s all this urgency that the FBI has to send two dozen or more agents to the home and spend nine hours doing this task? Speaking of which – if the informant told them exactly where everything was, what’s up with the nine hours?

I begin to wonder whether this supposed mole was a double agent, setting the FBI up for an embarrassing failure.

After that, the article goes into a lengthy discussion of the Archives and the Presidential Records Act, but somehow omits that fact that violations are almost never treated as criminal, even then they are usually considered misdemeanors, no potential violator has ever been subject to a raid, and they have never been enforced against an ex-president. Then:

The affidavit to obtain the search warrant, the intelligence source says, contained abundant and persuasive detail that Trump continued to possess the relevant records in violation of federal law, and that investigators had sufficient information to prove that those records were located at Mar-a-Lago—including the detail that they were contained in a specific safe in a specific room.

Ah, that’s why they’re telling us about the supposed informant. This information must have come from that person. Of course, according to Trump’s family, that “specific safe” – which was opened by an FBI safecracker, in a scene apparently worthy of Geraldo and Al Capone’s vault – was empty. I repeat: was the informant setting up the FBI? Or just plain lying? Or non-existent?

“In order for the investigators to convince the Florida judge to approve such an unprecedented raid, the information had to be solid, which the FBI claimed,” says the intelligence source.

Tell us another one – you already used that story up with Russiagate and the FISA court, and we know that the right judge will approve garbage. But I don’t for a moment doubt that the FBI claimed their information was solid.

The construction of this paragraph is a little strange:

Though Trump and his Republican Party allies are portraying the raid as politically motivated, it is likely the unprecedented nature of the raid on the property of a former president will have the greatest reverberation. Even Trump’s political rivals have rallied in condemning the FBI.

In other words, what I think this is trying to convey is that of course Trump allies say it’s political. But one doesn’t have to listen to them or even like Trump to observe that it is political – it’s obvious that it is.

And then we have another preposterous assertion:

The Biden White House says the president was not briefed about the Mar-a-Lago raid and knew nothing about it in advance.

So we’re supposed to be reassured by the idea that the FBI didn’t feel the need to run it by the White House – which I don’t for a minute believe anyway? Note that the statement is not saying that the White House didn’t approve of the general idea of such a raid – just that they were purposely not kept abreast of the schedule and the specific details of this one. And the White House is saying “no comment,” because it can.

Also:

The senior Justice Department source says that Garland was regularly briefed on the Records Act investigation, and that he knew about the grand jury and what material federal prosecutors were seeking. He insists, though, that Garland had no prior knowledge of the date and time of the specific raid, nor was he asked to approve it. “I know it’s hard for people to believe,” says the official, “but this was a matter for the U.S. Attorney and the FBI.”

You got that right – it’s hard for people to believe. And again, it wouldn’t be the least bit reassuring even if it were true, because it would mean the FBI is not just the secret police, but a secret police entity answerable to no one.

Here’s the conclusion of the article:

FBI director Christopher Wray ultimately gave his go-ahead to conduct the raid, the senior Justice official says. “It really is a case of the Bureau misreading the impact.”

Ah, so it was Wray, was it? The buck stops with him? Again, it’s very difficult if not impossible to imagine that’s true. But then again, maybe he is just arrogant enough – as demonstrated by his recent Congressional testimony, prior to the raid – to do such a thing on his own. And they either stupidly “misread” the impact or they jut don’t care about the impact because they believe their power is unassailable.

Another strange thing about this entire episode is that I think quite a few people who thought Trump was full of it when he talked about the 2020 election being stolen might be seeing what the FBI has just done and thinking: Hey, wait a minute; if they are willing to do something like this to stop Trump from running, maybe they really did rig the 2020 election. The intensity of the hatred of Trump and the desperate Ahab-like desire to get him is very much out in the open here.

The other day I quoted a speech that Captain Ahab made just before his fatal last attempt to kill Moby Dick. It seems apropos to quote it again, but this time I’m going to quote more of it:

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!”

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;–ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.