The FBI raid on Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago in Florida is, in an American season of prodigies, remarkable, strange and potentially disastrous – bad news for America and the world.
It moves the US closer to civil conflict and to a complete breakdown of politics. Unless it was overwhelmingly necessary, it was a shocking error of judgment at best, and perhaps something worse, by US Attorney-General, Merrick Garland. Short term, it’s good news for Trump and for the Democratic Party, in the horrible duet of destruction they are performing together.
This column shares John Howard’s view that Trump is unfit for high office. There were good and bad things in Trump’s presidency. But his behaviour after losing the 2020 presidential election by more than seven million votes has been despicable.
He has mounted a systematic assault on the most basic component of democratic politics – the peaceful transfer of power from the loser of an election to the winner of that election.
But Trump’s many moral and political offences, and perhaps legal offences, do not give anyone else the right to break or bend the law in their hostility to him. Indeed, the single biggest factor that Trump has had going for him all through his time in national politics is the dishonest and extreme actions and statements of a good number of his opponents.
Trump did and said a lot of bad things. He lied constantly. There was seemingly not a Stalinist dictator in the world he didn’t admire. He was on the brink of trashing alliances over and over again. He tried to misuse US government institutions for his own benefit – getting guests to stay at Trump hotels was the very least of it. Any Trump apologist who doesn’t believe this should read any of the Trump White House memoirs.
Those by John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser for nearly 18 months, and Mark Esper, Trump’s second last defence secretary, are two instructive examples. Neither of these men could remotely be classified as part of the Washington establishment. They are, not to traduce them in any way, among the most right-wing men ever to hold their respective posts, both hand-picked by Trump. They reluctantly came to the view that Trump was both an inveterate liar and had no ethical boundaries. To do their constitutional duty by their nation they defied or delayed various Trump instructions.
Having said all that, many of Trump’s Democrat critics were never content to tell the truth about Trump, and the truth was certainly bad enough, but constantly invented lies about him.
The best example was the Russian collusion hoax. There is no doubt at all that Russia tried, through social media, to influence the 2016 presidential election in favour of Trump and against Hillary Clinton. There is absolutely no evidence at all that Trump engaged in any collusion about this.
Yet a special prosecutor was appointed on the basis of this false premise and spent many months trawling through Trump’s affairs. All kinds of innuendo were leaked against Trump, almost every bit of which was untrue. This pattern was repeated over and over during Trump’s presidency. Those who styled themselves defenders of democracy stooped to undemocratic, dishonest and probably illegal means in prosecuting their war against Trump. They were not as bad as Trump but they were bad enough.
Now Trump’s home has been raided. There is still a great deal about this raid that we do not know. However, so far, we know the raid occurred in part because Garland’s Justice Department believes Trump continued to possess top secret and “sensitive compartmentalised information”. There is a press rumour, as yet unconfirmed, that some of these documents related to US nuclear secrets. If it turns out that Trump really committed a serious crime, and really possessed, say, the nuclear codes or some such, then there may be a case for the raid.
But it all looks extremely dodgy at this stage, especially given how many times the FBI has got things wrong in the recent past.
Generally it is a weak defence of Trump apologists to say he may be a crook but so is the other side. However, it is reasonable and right to compare how Trump’s handling of secret documents is treated compared with the behaviour of other senior officials.
As was revealed in 2016, when Clinton was secretary of state she secretly used a number of private email servers to conduct official business on behalf of the US government. This was against the rules, compromised security and allowed Clinton to keep things secret forever from any government record. When, under legal compulsion, she finally handed over these documents, she had deleted many, many emails she claimed were private. There is no way of knowing, beyond Clinton’s word, whether these were truly private or not.
While she was secretary of state, Bill Clinton made huge amounts of money as a speaker in countries that wanted Hillary’s favourable notice. Given how grubby and greedy the Clintons were about making private money, there is every reason to doubt her good faith.
The FBI censured Hillary Clinton for this and was clear that it could have launched a prosecution but decided not to. Nor was there ever any raid. Clinton was a candidate in the 2016 presidential election and believes the unfavourable comment made against her by the FBI cost her the election. Nonetheless, compared with Trump, she was treated with kid gloves.
Presidents can also declassify documents. All of Bob Woodward’s books contain top-secret information given to him by officials. No one raises a security eyebrow. There is great discretion in the US system about whether to prosecute. Garland could have kept negotiating with Trump about documents. Handling Clinton gently and Trump roughly convinces Trump voters the system is rigged against them.
Another example: a discarded laptop of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was discovered to contain lurid details of drug taking, low-life exploits and lucrative business deals Hunter undertook in China and Ukraine while his father was vice-president. At the very least, this deserves aggressive investigation.
Yet when the story first broke, dozens of former US intelligence officials, some at the highest possible level, came out publicly to say the documents were probably false and had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
It turned out the documents were true. This shows the politicisation of senior elements of the intelligence community.
The Mar-a-Lago raid helps Trump because it forces all Republicans to rally behind him, whereas every intelligent Republican had been trying, with some success, to move the party beyond Trump. It helps the Democrats because it distracts attention from their woeful economic performance and, given Joe Biden’s anaemic, baleful presidency, introduces the one factor that more than anything else can enthuse Democrat voters to turn out in November, to vote against Trump once more.
The whole sordid process gravely disillusions American voters. Unless the raid produces a smoking gun of overwhelming power, Garland will go down in history as one of the most destructive and irresponsible attorneys-general the US has had. Incidentally, a crippled US politics is bad news for the whole world.
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