Kash Patel's "Government Gangsters" was tied up for publication in massive amounts of red tape with the Department of Defense. Patel was Pentagon Chief of Staff under the Trump administration. The book has now been released with Post Hill Press.
After spying on the Trump campaign and on a sitting president, it seemed like the FBI had no more lines it could cross. Then, in August 2022, the FBI did something it had never done before. They raided the home of a former president of the United States and a man who could well run for the presidency again. I know better than anyone just how deeply the FBI has been politicized and corrupted. But even so, the Mar-a-Lago raid shocked me.
The raid was approved by none other than Attorney General Merrick Garland himself. The White House publicly denied having any involvement, but that’s not how these things work in Washington—and it’s certainly not possible in this case. There is absolutely no way that the White House Counsel wasn’t fully engaged beforehand with the FBI and DoJ about raiding the home of the president’s former and potentially future opponent. In fact, not only did they know, but subsequent reporting on uncovered documents showed that the Biden White House authorized the recission of executive privilege so that presidential documents protected by this longstanding privilege could be grabbed by the FBI. In fact, the White House Counsel’s office was proactively emailing the National Archives and Records Administration, along with other government officials, who were engaging with the FBI and DoJ to prepare for the raid.
The Mar-a-Lago raid makes Watergate look like the teacup ride at Disney World. Instead of the sitting president having political cronies break into the offices of his opponent, his administration had the tax-payer-funded FBI violate longstanding precedent, which protected the constitutional privileges of the executive branch, by busting into the personal residence of his predecessor and political opponent.
Amazingly, the FBI and the DoJ at first made no attempt to explain themselves. Days after the raid, Attorney General Merrick Garland finally held a press conference, arriving an hour late while looking like he was in a hostage video. In his remarks, he didn’t acknowledge that vast swaths of the American people—Republicans, Independents, and even many Democrats—felt like the FBI had crossed the Rubicon. Instead, he attacked people who criticized the FBI and the DoJ. It’s as if he had no ability to understand why anybody would doubt the motives of federal law enforcement, despite everything he, his predecessors, and other senior leaders in the bureaucracy had done over recent years to completely undermine public trust in our institutions.
Attorney General Garland’s message was clear: They weren’t wrong for committing an egregious and unprecedented mafia-style mob invasion against their political opponent. We were in the wrong for questioning them. It was just like how they attacked us during Russia Gate. Ultimately, it was a threat. He was attempting to disqualify President Trump from ever running again while sending a message to the American people that if they can do this to a former president, they can do it to anybody, so you’d better shut up and get in line.
The alleged rationale for the Mar-a-Lago raid was that President Trump had boxes of documents that were “marked classified.” Only later did the corrupt authorities and media shills start to say that Trump had “extremely sensitive” intelligence. If that’s the case, why did they wait nearly two years to get the documents? Additionally, the judge signed the search warrant on a Friday, but the FBI took a holiday over the weekend until Monday to execute. How could they possibly wait those extra days if the materials were “extremely sensitive?” This is not how an apolitical investigation works. All of this was another excuse to implement a two- tiered system of justice.
The truth is that Trump was the most transparent president in his- tory. Toward the end of his term he declassified whole sets of documents, including every single document relating to Russia Gate and to the Hillary Clinton email scandal. In fact, as president, he had the unilateral authority to declassify absolutely anything he wanted. When a president says something is declassified, it is declassified. That’s it. The Supreme Court even ruled that the president has this authority in the 1988 case Navy v. Egan. That is why I believe the FBI should come up with double zeros on this raid.
In fact, the legal precedent and federal case law is overwhelming that the president has the power to declassify and/or keep records at will. When former president Bill Clinton was caught hiding recordings from his presidency in his sock drawer, a watchdog group filed a lawsuit to force the National Archives to retrieve the recordings. In that case, a US district judge ruled that the archives had no authority to seize such records and that “the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President’s term and in his sole discretion.” The judge went on saying that attempting to seize records directly from a former president is “unfounded, contrary to the [Presidential Records Act’s] express terms, and contrary to traditional principles of administrative law.” 26 Clinton still has his recordings to this day, for all we know sitting in the same sock drawer. Why hasn’t the DoJ applied this legal standard to Trump? It is a two-tiered system of justice.
Further, Trump isn’t even hiding the documents he held at Mar-a-Lago. Before the raid, Trump let the Department of Justice in to see the records. In June 2022—two months before the raid—government agents came in to look at the boxes and asked that the president put an extra lock on the room where they were kept. President Trump personally met those agents at Mar-a-Lago, showed them the documents, and complied with their request to add another lock. Ironically, that was the very same lock the FBI went on to break during their raid.
To read the full op-ed, visit Human Events.
