those who charge that Attorney General Merrick Garland was acting out of political partisanship must consider two things: These headlines
overshadowed President Biden's
victory lap for his big win in Congress on a landmark bill addressing both the climate crisis and health care. He was just as
blindsided by Garland's search as the rest of us, and can't be happy about seeing his moment of triumph upstaged. The White House clearly meant for Wednesday morning's news of legislative successes to be a major turning point for Democratic prospects in the midterms.
At the same time, Biden got exactly what he
sought when he named Garland his AG: A chief legal officer who would not consult him and who would put his head down and do his job, independent of politics.
consider the dangerous and hypocritical
attacks on law enforcement by Trump defenders who hold elected office. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., tweeted "
Defund the FBI!" Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., referred to the warrant-based search as sponsored by "
Marxists," quite likely in an attempt to fire up his voter base among anti-communist Cuban Americans as he runs for re-election.
As for hypocrisy, there is no principled way to
demand that the Justice Department investigate Hunter Biden, as Republicans continue to do, and simultaneously to attack the DOJ's independently validated search of Trump's home. To obtain a search warrant for Trump's premises at Mar-a-Lago, federal prosecutors clearly satisfied a federal magistrate that evidence existed that the former president had committed a crime that justified the intrusion.
while the search warrant required a showing of probable cause that a crime had been committed, as a practical matter, the federal magistrate judge who issued the warrant, Bruce Reinhart, almost surely applied a far higher standard of proof.
The target here was no ordinary public official, but rather a former president of the United States. Reinhart understood that the validity of the warrant would surely become public at some point and receive microscopic scrutiny in the media. It will also be reviewed by a district court judge, should Trump be indicted and should the prosecution seek to offer evidence from the search at trial.
No magistrate judge wants to be professionally embarrassed in a high-visibility case. Reinhart surely required the FBI's warrant application to meet the most exacting standards.
Because no magistrate judge wants to be reversed or professionally embarrassed, especially in a high-visibility case, Reinhart would have required the FBI's warrant application to meet the most exacting standards before he approved it. The Aug. 10 report that the FBI had a source for its warrant
inside Mar-a-Lago suggests that this judge, a
veteran prosecutor with experience in matters of public corruption and then as a criminal defense lawyer, was on extremely solid ground authorizing the search.
Trump faces no constraints about releasing the nonclassified items on the FBI's requisite inventory of what evidence agents collected in the search, a copy of which was left on the premises. If, as Trump claims, the search was purely
politically motivated, making that inventory public would serve the public interest in holding the DOJ and FBI accountable.
The longer Trump fails to do so, the stronger two inferences become. First, that his protests about the Mar-a-Lago search are just one more false cry of victimhood. And second, that his future may well hold another opportunity to exercise his Fifth Amendment rights, this one not coming in a civil case but in a criminal one.
