Tucker Carlson: The Mar-a-Lago raid was a power grab
Fox News host Tucker Carlson shreds the FBI's raid on former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
We've had a few days to reflect on it and have concluded that no honest person could believe that the raid on Donald Trump's home last week was a legitimate act of law enforcement. It was not. Even the Biden administration didn't really bother to pretend otherwise. The official explanations that we have heard for the raid make no sense at all. It doesn't matter how forcefully they are repeated by the media, they're nonsensical. In case you've forgotten what they are, here's the very first explanation they gave us.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, HISTORIAN: Why did this guy have these ultra-classified documents in the basement of Mar-a-Lago unsecured, where they could be presumably broken in on or stolen or photographed and given to hostile foreign powers or conceivably even terrorists?
Are you listening to this? So, it's not just classified documents in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, but according to Michael Beschloss, the pet historian of the halfwits who run our country, these are ultra-classified documents, the most classified kind, just sitting there helpless in boxes like maidens in bikinis, waiting to be photographed by terrorists. You just imagine al-Qaeda taking selfies with these documents, one after the other relentlessly, repulsive and terrifying.
Is it true? At this point, no one has provided proof that it is true, not that august historians like Michael Beschloss wait around for actual evidence before pronouncing final judgment on cable news shows. They just go ahead, but for the sake of argument on our show, we're going to say that it is in fact true and that Donald Trump did, in fact, have boxes of classified documents sitting in his cellar.
Let's say that's true. What would it mean? Well, what it means depends in part on what the documents were. Did those documents contain meaningful information? Should they have been classified in the first place? Is there a good reason the rest of us should not have been allowed to see those documents?
Now, you never hear those questions asked in public, but anyone who lives in Washington knows perfectly well they should be asked in public a lot, because in Washington, virtually anything can qualify as an official state secret and often does.
In 2011, to name one of many examples, the CIA finally declassified a trove of documents from the First World War. These documents dated back to 1917, almost 100 years before. One of these documents, the most ultra-secret of them, contained a recipe for disappearing ink. Now, why would federal bureaucrats spend an entire century hiding an outdated recipe for ink that you can buy legally in any magic store for your fifth grader? Good question. No one asked it.
Instead, then CIA Director Leon Panetta issued a press release bragging about how he was giving the secret ink recipe to a grateful public. "These documents remain classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them," Panetta wrote. "When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people."
President Donald Trump, accompanied by Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Donald Trump, right, speaks before signing the National Security Presidential Memorandum to Launch the "Women's Global Development and Prosperity" Initiative (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
There was no hint whatsoever that Panetta was joking when he wrote that. You're welcome, America. Here's your century-old ink recipe. Again, this was in 2011. So, think it through. You had to wonder what recent technological advancements was Leon Panetta talking about in the press release and just how recent were they? Was Panetta actually saying that CIA spies were still communicating in World War One era disappearing ink as of, say, 2010 or even as of 1950? Please. It was bizarre. Of course, it was another lie from the people in charge.
Here's the truth. The documents have been classified for 100 years, not because disappearing ink was any sort of national security secret. They'd been classified because the government's default position in every case is that you have no right to see anything ever. It is their information. It is not yours. You're not a citizen. You're just the taxpayer. Shut up and pay for it all. To this day, there are large amounts of classified information remaining from World War II. These are documents written 80 years ago by people whose grandchildren are now old, but you still can't see it. You don't have the clearances. Sorry.
So, when they tell you that Donald Trump had classified documents in his basement, those materials could be literally anything, but once again, for the sake of argument, we're going to stipulate that Trump did have possession of documents that were classified for some good reason. Documents that, for example, we legitimately would not want the Chinese government to see. If that is true, would it justify what happened? Would it justify sending a large team of federal agents to shut down the entire southern tip of Palm Beach to raid Mar-a-Lago on a weekday? No, it wouldn't. So, one of the laws they're telling you that Trump broke doesn't even have criminal penalties attached to it because it's not serious enough.
Federal paramilitaries don't show up at your house when you violate the Presidential Records Act and in fact, as we later learned, the actual warrant for the raid, which was signed by an openly partisan judge because you couldn't make any of this up if you tried, once represented Jeffrey Epstein's side in the famous underage sex case, that judge. That judge allowed the FBI to seize virtually every piece of paper in Donald Trump's house, whether or not it had ever been classified.
They took Roger Stone's clemency order, for example. That had been on the front page of the Washington Post, so was therefore probably not a secret. Apparently, the feds even walked off with Donald Trump's passports preventing him from leaving the country. So, whatever else this raid was, this raid was not about the Presidential Records Act. That explanation is absurd. It's almost as ridiculous as the claim that the White House knew nothing about the raid before it happened. Right. Please. If they're going to lie to us, they ought to try a little harder. So, what was this raid about? Well, we're keeping track. So, here's the second explanation they gave us.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Now with Donald Trump, suddenly, when we're talking about the possibility of nuclear weapons, classified documents of the highest classified status being stolen from the White House and taken to Mar-a-Lago.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Just a reminder of why the Justice Department might be a little bit concerned about nuclear secrets knocking around Mar-a-Lago.
SCARBOROUGH: Two words for you, my friend. Two words. "Nuclear secrets."
What! Nuclear secrets? Nuclear secrets are the highest classified status. Ultra-secret nuclear secrets. Donald Trump stole those. Ladies and gentlemen, America is in danger tonight. That was their new explanation for the raid. Now, that revised storyline was leaked anonymously to an obedient press corps, which, as you just saw, repeated every word like it was verifiable fact.
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Once again, no one even bothered to explain what these nuclear secrets might be. What's a nuclear secret exactly and what did Trump plan to do with them? Did he plan to defect to Moscow, give the launch codes to Vladimir Putin, start his own rogue state in the Bahamas? Nobody said, but that didn't stop former CIA director Michael Hayden from suggesting that Donald Trump should be executed, fried to death in the electric chair, for committing these crimes, whatever these crimes were. We still don't know.
There weren't a lot of facts floating around. There still aren't, but there was a reason for that. They couldn't tell you the whole story. They couldn't release all the documents because that would jeopardize American national security. So instead, you're just going to have to trust them and of course, you're going to have to listen to their outrage. There was a lot of that. There was endless huffing on television about something called the rule of law and how absolutely no one is above that. No one. Not even a former president.
We're informed of this by the same people who paid rioters to burn down our cities, the ones who eliminated bail, the ones who encouraged tens of millions of foreign nationals to ignore our federal immigration statutes and move to our country permanently at public expense as a reward for breaking our laws, but keep in mind, no one is above the law. That was definitely the word from Joe Scarborough, a man who was accused of committing murder while serving as a member of Congress, yet somehow move seamlessly to the MSNBC lineup without being charged or even investigated. No one is above the law. Remember that.
So, it was an awful lot of posturing in the days after the raid. But none of it was very effective because again, it didn't make sense. Even propaganda has to add up. Two plus two equals nine doesn't convince anybody.
Nuclear secrets? If the Biden administration really believed that, if they really thought Donald Trump possessed documents that posed an imminent danger to American national security, then you have to wonder, why did they wait a year and a half to do anything about it? Why did they wait till 90 days before a midterm election, an election that polls suggest they will lose? It doesn't make, oh, wait, actually, it does make sense.
In fact, the question answers itself. Despite superficial appearances, the raid of Mar-a-Lago was not an act of law enforcement. It was the opposite of that. It was an attack on the rule of law. It was a power grab. As Matt Boose put it recently, in American Greatness, the raid on Trump's home "was exactly what it looks like, a show of force against the opposition leader by the head of state and his personal bodyguards. If this happened in, any other country would immediately be denounced as the act of a dictator."
That's true, but it's hard to hear those words anyway. As an American, you don't want to believe it and yet here are the essential facts. The same week the Biden White House announced that Joe Biden will definitely seek a second term as president, the same week, the Biden Justice Department launched an armed raid against Biden's main rival in that same presidential election. That's what happened. Pause for a minute. If The New York Times told you that something like that was going on in Chad or the Gambia, what would your reaction be?
You'd probably say to yourself, "Thank God I don't live in a place like that, a country where politicians used armed men to cling to power." Oh, but you do live in a country like that. You do. The evidence is all around us. We just don't want to see it. A week to the day after Joe Biden was inaugurated, the FBI arrested a 31-year-old man from Vermont called Douglass Mackey. According to the subsequent DOJ press release, Mackey committed an extremely serious crime. Like Vladimir Putin, he conspired to subvert the 2016 presidential election.
In a tweet, Mackey had suggested, but not explicitly said, but suggested, that it was possible to vote for Hillary Clinton by text message. This act, proclaimed acting U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme, was a grave felony, a felony punishable by ten years in prison. Mackey's tweet, DuCharme said, amounted to "misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote." Assistant FBI Director William Sweeney confirmed that Douglass Mackey had, in fact, committed "vote theft." So, as befitting a criminal of this magnitude, Mackey was handcuffed and hauled before a federal judge in Florida called Bruce Reinhart, as it turns out, the same magistrate who authorized last week's raid on Mar-a-Lago. Weird. Then, Mackey was hauled off to jail.
Now, Mackey's arrest seemed like a significant story, but at the time, media coverage was relatively scant and almost uniformly credulous. The reporters who covered it simply clipped quotes from the DOJ press release and moved on to something else. Why? Well, The New York Times set the tone early by describing Mackey as "a far-right Twitter troll."
"Far-right Twitter troll" is not a technical term. In fact, it is no agreed upon meaning of any kind. It is slang and slang is something that serious newspapers never include in news stories, but in this case, the term "far right Twitter troll" had a use. It sent an unmistakable message to the country and in particular, to the rest of the media and it was this: Douglass Mackey is a dangerous person with unspeakably ugly views.He deserves to be locked up. And so he was.
There was no consideration of the merits of the government's case against Douglass Mackey but there should have been, because the case was absurd. If Mackey's tweets were so threatening to our system of government, toward democracy, then why did the Department of Justice wait more than four years until the week Donald Trump left office to charge him? And if Mackey actually stole the votes of American citizens, as the FBI repeatedly alleged that he did, whose votes were stolen? Who exactly were the victims of Douglas Mackey's crimes? The media never asked. The Biden administration never said.
As of tonight, the Justice Department has never identified a single person who was prevented from voting or from doing anything else by what Douglass Mackey tweeted because there weren't any people. Those people didn't exist.
Douglass Mackey was not a criminal mastermind running a conspiracy to commit voter fraud. Douglass Mackey was an Internet prankster. His job was to think up funny memes on his laptop in his bedroom. That's what he did. Here's one of his means on the screen hash. "#DraftOurDaughters," Mackey wrote in what was very obviously a fake tweet from the Hillary Clinton campaign."They are ready to go to war for her. Are you?" Pretty funny.
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the anti-Trump dossier through law firm Perkins Coie. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images) ((Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images))
Mackey was mocking Hillary Clinton. No one could miss that. He wasn't subverting elections. He was making fun of the candidate and in fact, no one did miss that. Not a single person in America actually believed that Douglass Mackey’s Twitter memes infringed on "one of the most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the right to vote." Absolutely no one believed that. No one could believe that because it's too stupid a claim to believe and yet Nicholas McQuaid, who went to Columbia Law School and is now Joe Biden's assistant attorney general, made that claim anyway verbatim and did so with a straight face, " Douglass Mackey is a threat to democracy." So, he faces ten years in prison. The DOJ press release said.
That three paragraphs later, the same press release inadvertently acknowledged what was actually going on. In the run up to the 2016 election, the DOJ explained, Douglass Mackey had gained more influence on Twitter than either NBC News or (gasp) Stephen Colbert himself. Now the criminal complaint against Douglass Mackey actually spells that. You can read it for yourself. It's still online.
The Biden administration argued that on Twitter, people liked Douglass Mackey more than they liked NBC News or Stephen Colbert and they may not seem bad to you. It may seem fine having grown up as you did in a country where people were allowed to choose what they read, but according to the government Joe Biden now runs, that's a felony.
Now you don't have to be a right-winger to find that terrifying. In a free country, you have an absolute right to say what you think in public, period, doesn't matter who is offended by what you say. It doesn't matter if people consider your views ugly. Even if every person on the planet finds your opinions horrifying and beyond the pale, you still have the right to express them because you were born with that right. It's inherent. You cannot be sent to prison for your political views ever. That is the core principle of the United States. That is the principle that Marines fought their way to the top of Mount Suribachi to protect.
So, whatever you think of his means, Douglass Mackey’s freedom of speech was very much worth defending, but virtually nobody defended it. Aside from a few brave and honorable exceptions, even so-called conservative media stayed silent as Douglass Mackey’s life was destroyed by the Biden Justice Department. He's still in limbo, facing ten years. Why? Well, because The New York Times had called him a far-right Twitter troll and no respectable person wanted to be anywhere near that. So, the purge continued.
Douglass Mackey may have been the first victim of the new authoritarianism, but he was hardly the last one. Over the last 18 months, virtually every significant figure in the orbiter at Donald Trump has been swept up by Merrick Garland at Department of Justice. Their homes raided, their personal communications seized and leaked to the media. Some have been arrested and thrown in jail. Donald Trump's lawyers are the primary targets. Today, the DOJ subpoenaed Eric Herschmann. He represented Trump during the first impeachment. Herschmann never worked in the White House counsel's office.
The Biden administration is going after him anyway because he gave legal advice to his client, Donald Trump. That used to be allowed. People used to be allowed to have lawyers and speak to them privately, but it's not allowed anymore. That's what the CIA seized attorney client records from Mar-a-Lago. It's also why the DOJ is now directly targeting Trump's most prominent personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. For years, the feds have been going after Giuliani's associates, including a man called George Dickson. Dickson was working on a documentary about Hunter Biden. Last year, the FBI raided his home in California. The feds also broke into Giuliani's own apartment, as well as his office in New York. Then the FBI targeted a Giuliani associate called Igor Fruman because he dug up evidence of misconduct by Joe Biden in Ukraine. They sent Fruman to prison.
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Then the FBI seized the phone of prominent conservative attorney Victoria Toensing. She'd worked with Giuliani in 2020 to investigate election fraud. They raided her home. Today, the DOJ announced that Giuliani himself is a target of a federal investigation. Why exactly? Well, because like Toensing and so many others who were now under investigation or under arrest, Giuliani questioned the 2020 election outcome, in this case, in the state of Georgia. Really? Questioning the election outcome in the state of Georgia? Isn't that something Stacey Abrams has made a career of doing? Yes, but Republicans no longer have that right.
Not long ago, more than a dozen federal agents swooped in for a pre-dawn raid on former Trump official Jeff Clark. They left him on the street in his underwear for maximum humiliation. Then they seized John Eastman's phone. Eastman was also a Trump attorney. He was approached by six agents at a restaurant in New Mexico while leaving dinner with his wife. They patted him down and forced him to provide facial biometric data to unlock his phone. Then the DOJ tried the same thing with Steve Bannon's lawyer, Bob Costello, trying to force him to surrender his privileged phone and email records. We could go on and on and on. The point is, all of this is illegal. It violates the First Amendment and violates long-established attorney-client privilege, but it's happening right in front of us a lot.
The FBI has shackled former Trump official Peter Navarro as he was boarding a flight at Reagan National Airport. He was handcuffed, denied food and water, refused permission to make a phone call to his lawyer. Then because that wasn't terrifying enough, Biden's FBI went after a sitting congressman perceived as too close to Trump. His name was Congressman Scott Perry. A day after the Mar-a-Lago raid, the feds seized Congressman Perry's phone while he was traveling with his family. They could have called his lawyer and set up something. They didn't bother. That just nabbed him in front of his family and these are the prominent victims of this crackdown on civil liberties being conducted by the Biden administration.
Of course, in the wake of the January 6 election justice protests, more than 900 people have been arrested and charged with crimes arising from that day, 900, almost all of them nonviolent, almost all of them with no previous criminal record. More than 50 of them have been sentenced to prison so far, including one with terminal cancer. Her crime? Walking around the Capitol building for a few minutes and that's just the beginning. There are another 500 cases to go. In fact, the DOJ is getting under $34 million, another 130 more employees, just to handle all those cases from January 6, from the election justice protests, which is what they were. Now, superficially, all of this is about Donald Trump and on some level, it is. Permanent Washington does not want Trump to run again. Of course, it's their greatest fear and they're doing all he can to prevent it.
It turns out democracy is too important to let voters choose their own president, but if you take three steps back and consider what's actually going on, you'll see that none of this is really about Donald Trump, the man. It's about power and that means it's about crushing and humiliating anyone who gets in the way of people who want to retain power and that means anyone. How about Alex Berenson? Alex Berenson is a novelist and former New York Times reporter. He's got an Ivy League degree, lives in the Northeast. In no way does Alex Berenson fit the profile of your average Trump voter. Certainly not the stereotype.
In fact, it's hard to believe that he voted for Donald Trump. We don't know and it doesn't matter. We do know that when Alex Berenson started to post fact-based challenges to the lies Joe Biden was telling about COVID and then the COVID vaccines, the White House commanded Twitter to silence Alex Berenson and Twitter soon did that and we're not speculating about what happened. There are written exchanges that prove what happened. We're going to talk to Alex Berenson in a minute about the details, but the point is, this is illegal. No American government is allowed to collude with private business to silence its critics. Period. That is an unambiguous violation of the First Amendment. It's also a violation, of course, of Alex Brunson's human rights, and yet somehow this slipped beneath notice. The New York Times didn't write about it. Why would they? On some level, you understand because what happened to Alex Berenson has happened to many, many, many critics of the Biden administration in the past year and a half. They have been censored. They have been silenced at the direction of the White House.
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Think about what this means. These are acts of aggression and hostility aimed at Americans. No American president has ever done this. No American president has ever explicitly declared war on his own population and yet for the Biden administration, it's a near weekly occurrence. Here's Joe Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, telling you that White supremacists, in other words, Trump voters, because that's what they mean when they say White supremacists, a term they've never defined, White supremacist Trump voters are the single greatest terror threat the United States faces.
MERRICK GARLAND: In the FBI's view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the White race.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: According to the United States intelligence community, domestic terrorism from White supremacists is the most lethal terrorist threat in the homeland.
So, not to be too literal, but this is on some level a news show, that's a lie. None of what you heard is true. There's not a single statistic or piece of credible research to support what Biden or his attorney general just said. Again, all of it is a lie. The truth, as usual, is the opposite. These are the people who created the crime wave America is suffering under and now they're blaming you for it and for good measure, they're disarming you because you cannot be trusted with guns because you're too dangerous and just in case you missed the theme here, they're hiring another 87,000 armed IRS agents just to make sure that you obey. Got it? Got it? Is it clear? Amazingly, some Republican leaders still don't get it or pretend they don't get it. Here's Asa Hutchinson, still somehow the governor of Arkansas in a holding pattern before he transitions to the Wal-Mart board, assuring that the FBI is completely on the level.
ARKANSAS ASA HUTCHINSON: The FBI is simply carrying out their responsibilities under the law, a lawful search warrant that a magistrate has signed off on and they didn't go in there with FBI raid jackets. They tried to constrain their behavior carrying out that warrant. So, let's support law enforcement. Let's stand with them.
Oh, the FBI is just simply carrying out their responsibilities. Of course, they are. "What? Well you don't support law enforcement? There's nothing to see here." That's the line and no doubt Asa Hutchinson and Mitch McConnell and Dan Crenshaw and the rest of them will be telling you the very same thing when the Biden Justice Department or some other state law enforcement agency under their influence finally does what you know they're going to do, which is indict Donald Trump. Obviously, they're going to do that. Who knows how.
Maybe they'll produce surveillance video from Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, they've already subpoenaed that and we'll spend the next year talking about how it shows Trump mishandling classified information. Really? On the server. Remember the endless Russia collusion hoax? We're in for a lot more of that. They will scream about how Trump is a criminal and if you express any support for him or any interest in retaining, I don't know, the rights of free speech and due process, you're a criminal, too. In fact, you are the threat. You're the threat and just mentioning you disagree with what is happening is an attack on our government. That's their style.
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Just the other day, after signing off on the Mar-a-Lago raid, your Attorney General, Merrick Garland, came on stage to whine about how actually he was the victim here. He's the victim. Apparently, some people disagreed with the raid, so the FBI, the most heavily armed domestic law enforcement agency in the world, is now under threat from you. Right. You're the criminal. Our critics are in jail, but I got anonymous threats on Twitter. Poor me. Passive aggression is the defining characteristic of the left. If they started putting people in camps, NBC News would cheer them on and then attack you for complaining about it. "How dare you, violating our norms. We've always had camps."
As if to prove it, they prove it every day, but in the hours after Mar-a-Lago raid, the usual jackals on Twitter, begin demanding that Donald Trump should release the warrant that justified the raid. "If you're not guilty, you'll show it to us," that's what they said. So, Trump did it. He gave the warrant to Breitbart News, which printed it, and then the second to Breitbart piece went up, the very same jackals start screaming about how far right-wing extremist are putting the lives of FBI agents in danger since those agents were named in the warrant, which is a public document. In other words, "We're the victims here. We're the victims."
It's always the same, except this time, unfortunately, it could be a little different. Indicting Donald Trump is a very big step, not simply because a lot of people like him and he's the former president, but because indicting him at this point would be to reveal that this entire thing and by thing we mean our justice system is just transparently political. It's just a means to an end, a means to power and people know that at this point. They've watched it. They understand what's happening. Even people who don't like Donald Trump, even people who didn't vote for Donald Trump and don't want to vote for him in 2024, they know and they can't unknow. And that means that we are at this point on the edge of something unprecedented and something awful. You could feel it. Even Donald Trump feels it.
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President Donald Trump speaks in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2017. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Maybe for the first time in his life, Donald Trump seems sincerely interested in lowering the temperature, not just for his own sake, but for the country. He said that. He's never said anything like that. Maybe he doesn't mean it, but when has he ever said that? "Let's all calm down a little," he said the other day. "This isn't good." Yeah, he's right.
It's not good and not just for him, for all of us. This could get very bad, very fast and the Biden people know that perfectly well. They know what could happen if they continue down this path of using law enforcement to cling to power. But they don't care because they're facing a repudiation from voters and they're desperate and they'll do anything but at what cost? Pray they pull back before it's too late.
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