FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago necessary to protect the rule of law
In John Sweeney’s timely new book, Killer in the Kremlin, he recounts an episode from 2005 when Vladimir Putin was visiting New York. Putin was a guest at the Guggenheim Museum when he “clocked a glass replica of a Kalashnikov filled with vodka.” What followed was extraordinary. The Russian President “gestured to one of his security team, who nicked it” but, as with so many other incidents before and since, “the museum worthies [didn’t] call the cops. So he got away with it.”
Sweeney’s point, more broadly, is that Putin is the gangster who crawled from the sewers of Leningrad to exploit the power vacuum of post-Communist Russia. He is the muculent thug who learned along the way that very few will stand up to him. To that end, the British government did a particularly good job at affirming his delusions in the shameful aftermath of the Salisbury poisoning when a weapon of mass destruction was casually released on British soil, killing one member of the public, Dawn Sturgess, and harming many others. If you want to understand our current energy crisis, largely precipitated by Russian violence in Ukraine, it lies in the story of that glass Kalashnikov and many like it: forgotten crimes that helped establish a sick and deep pathology that would eventually consume the world. As Sweeney might put it, history, as we’re living it, is “a frosted window into Vladimir Putin’s soul”.
All of which brings us to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s country club at Mar-a-Lago. So much commentary depicts the raid as provocative and certain to inflame tensions. Some argue that it will strengthen Trump’s bid for a second term, whilst others suspect it might yet save the Republican Party from the intentions of the 45th president. Whatever the outcome, Monday was a seminal moment when America’s legal system finally accepted that just because something is politically inconvenient doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. This was a necessary step in stopping Trump (or, indeed, future presidents) from sharing Putin’s delusion.
One of the misconceptions that formed during Trump’s years in the White House was that many of the constitutional rules were entirely optional. Trump styled himself as “your law-and-order president” (Putin, too, launched his career as an anti-corruption politician) yet casually broke so many rules. Sometimes those rules had names like The Hatch Act, but others were less formal. Some like The Presidential Records Act had relatively brief histories (it was only established in 1978) and little-known jurisdictions simply because they’d rarely been tested. But tested they will be. The evidence is mounting rapidly.
The FBI raid took all the oxygen on Monday night but, earlier in the day, journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser had a scoop that was just as revealing. They’d uncovered photographs for their forthcoming book, The Divider, thatdepict the shredded remnants of Trump’s thick Sharpie-line notes at the bottom of various presidential toilet bowls. Given that presidents since Carter are legally enacted to retain their written records, it was evidence of the kind of egregious lawbreaking that has characterised Trump’s attitude towards power. It’s precisely the kind of misdeeds that are finally being called out.
And that is what we witnessed on Monday when the FBI descended on Trump’s country club: justice being placed back on an apolitical footing. Attorney General Merrick Garland has not proved himself to be the crime fighter many Democrats had demanded but, rather, a cautious prosecutor. Even the White House wasn’t given advance notice of the raid, which was merely the escalation of months of legal bickering between Trump and his associates and the National Archives who had become frustrated about their inability to secure the presidential record and missing documents considered highly classified.
It’s a story that will naturally become politicised, but it also exposes the presumptions of the right-wing in the US and elsewhere. For all the talk on the Right of the Left being dominated by “feelings”, the Right is also in thrall to flabby thinking, gestural logic, and something worse: a supernatural belief in the religious underpinnings of their political heroes. They don’t seem to see the absurdities witnessed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, of Trump photoshopped onto a life-size cardboard cut-out of Rambo. The archly criminal Trump cannot be a bad guy because… he’s the hero. Or that’s what they believe.
Unfortunately for them, the legal system does not work on faith.
Just this last week came the conclusion of the trial of Alex Jones, a man who has made millions by making provocative statements to Trump World. We witnessed a very real contrast as Jones took to the witness stand claiming that he had no text messages about the Sandy Hook school shooting only to be presented with the contents of his text messages where he explicitly talked about Sandy Hook. He then claimed to have stopped using email before being presented with his emails.
Jones is the poster boy for a post-truth world in which the right of people to believe has become confused with the objective truth. Yet as Judge Maya Guerra Gamble made clear to Jones after he had lied repeatedly whilst under oath: “You believe everything you say is true, but it isn’t. Your beliefs do not make something true… Just because you claim to think something is true, does not make it true”.
Jones was eventually landed with a $49 million bill for those lies (he will probably pay much less due to an odd quirk in Texas’s legal system) and it’s increasingly likely that Trump will also have to face the consequences of his actions. Forgotten in all the political theatre and the phoney absolute divide between red and blue America is that many Republicans still believe in the rule of law and not all Democrats are lentil-licking lefties. Republican FBI agents will have been involved in serving the search warrant, issued under the leadership of an FBI chief appointed by Trump, enforcing laws that were strengthened by Republican presidents (particularly Reagan and George W. Bush), Republican Congresses, and conservative members of the Supreme Court.
Trump might be able to relabel the lifts in Trump Tower to project a city-conquering size and retreat to a palatial country club (with a notorious cockroach problem), but neither size nor glitz negates the smallness and squalor. “Just because you claim to think something is true, does not make it true.” The former President of the United States is learning this hard lesson. It’s to be hoped the current President of Russia is learning it too.