Attorney General Garland and Wray show 'utter lack of integrity and rectitude': Jarrett
Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett criticizes key players in the FBI's raid of former President Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago on 'Hannity.'
The confident predictions of Donald Trump’s sartorial refitting from blue custom suits to orange jumpsuits are, as always, premature and overwrought.
Hysteria is what members of the liberal media do best. Furious assumptions and wanton speculation are their specialties. They are terminally allergic to the meaning and nuance of laws. Facts are trifling matters that tend to impede their favored narrative.
But in the interest of truth and accuracy, let’s explore a few salient facts and relevant laws that the mainstream press would never bother to consider in their zeal to convict the former president of something—anything.
To prove a case that Trump stole government records—including allegedly classified documents—prosecutors would first have to establish that he misappropriated the material deliberately.
TRUMP ‘WILL DO WHATEVER’ HE CAN TO ‘HELP THE COUNTRY’ AFTER FBI RAID
Indeed, all three of the federal statutes cited in the Justice Department’s probable cause search warrant that led to the pre-dawn raid by the FBI on Trump’s Florida residence and office require that a person act "willfully" (18 USC 2071) or "knowingly" (18 USC 1519) or "intentionally" (18 USC 793).
These analogous terms mean exactly what they say. They describe the subjective state of mind or mental objective behind an individual’s actions. To prevail, Attorney General Merrick Garland and his lawyers would have to show actual knowledge by Trump of wrongdoing and that he intended to break the law.
So, for example, if Trump wanted to keep records that he thought belonged to him—even if his belief was mistaken—the statutes don’t necessarily apply. If he relied on staffers and lawyers to audit and inspect reams of documents shipped in boxes to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, he cannot be held vicariously culpable for the errors made by others.
The above-referenced federal codes identified in the controversial warrant are not "strict liability crimes" where intent or mental state are irrelevant. Just the opposite is true, as the language of the statutes plainly state. This renders any potential case against Trump problematic, if not anemic.
Let’s look at the broader landscape of what occurred. Presidents don’t personally pack up their papers and belongings when they depart the White House at the end of their term at noon on January 20th. This duty is performed by the General Services Administration (GSA) pursuant to federal law under the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, and later amendments.
Because presidents are federal government employees, any records created or received during their service are to be held in the custody of the National Archives. But properly identifying and sorting millions of documents in a short time frame is a recipe for mistakes, especially where personal papers have been commingled with official records. The sheer volume demands the use of large trucks and cargo planes to transport items to their designated storage. It is a staggering undertaking. Naturally, document transfers during transitions rarely run smoothly. Belated discovery of displaced materials and ownership disputes about them invariably occur.
In nearly every administration during the last 60 years, materials have been erroneously categorized and/or misplaced. That doesn’t mean a crime occurred. Subsequent negotiations with the National Archives is the rule, not the exception. Disagreements can be protracted but are usually resolved amicably.
This makes Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to convene a grand jury and seek a criminal warrant to search and seize documents at Trump’s home all the more confounding and suspicious. Equally bewildering was his defensive and self-righteous news conference that lasted all of five minutes.
Garland unwittingly undermined his own argument for the imperative of a warrant when he stated, "It is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search." Did the attorney general abide by his own rules? He did not.
The DOJ and FBI served Trump with a "less intrusive" subpoena in early June. The former president complied and turned over the requested documents. When government officials decided they wanted even more records, why didn’t Garland simply issue a second subpoena? Trump’s capitulation in the first instance strongly indicates he would have done so again. Why undertake a harshly invasive raid in the dark of the night by a battalion of agents and a phalanx of tactical support?
It makes little sense unless the purpose of the warrant was dishonest and served merely as a pretext for the FBI to rummage through Trump’s home for ten hours in the hope of seizing anything that Garland could exploit for a different objective. Is this an investigation in search of some other crime, perhaps an imagined seditious conspiracy connected to the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol? It sure looks like it. If it is, then Garland’s conduct is both unethical and wrong. It constitutes an abuse of power under the guise of legitimacy.
Distrust of the attorney general’s motive is compounded by the method he chose in securing the warrant. Instead of soliciting the approval of a federal district court judge for an intrusion of this magnitude, Garland and his confederates chose a low-level magistrate who is not a presidentially appointed and congressionally approved judge.
An experienced jurist would have posed challenging questions about why the government was not utilizing another subpoena. Was the magistrate, Bruce Reinhart, deceived or misled? It would not be the first time. During the infamous Russia hoax, an FBI lawyer altered emails to gain a federal warrant to spy on a Trump associate. That official, Kevin Clinesmith, later pleaded guilty to a felony. The FISA court that was duped later excoriated the FBI for its chicanery.
It is also troubling that Reinhart—prior to his appointment as a magistrate—posted anti-Trump opinions on social media attacking the president’s moral character. Six weeks before he signed off on the Mar-a-Lago warrant, Reinhart recused himself from a different case involving a Trump lawsuit by citing his own personal bias and lack of impartiality. Why, then, didn’t he also disqualify himself under the same statute when presented with the Trump warrant?
In his news conference, Garland feigned transparency by announcing that he was seeking the public release of the warrant and inventory list of materials seized. Yet, he did not ask that the most important documents of all be made public —the affidavits in support of the warrant. Those sworn statements by FBI and/or DOJ officials offer the reasoning and justification for the raid. They would also reveal whether the government withheld vital information from the magistrate or misrepresented the facts in order to secure his signature. The attorney general continues to conceal them.
Trump insists that documents previously designated as classified and top secret were declassified by him before he left office and that he was more than willing to convey them to the National Archives upon request. If Garland was so concerned about America’s national security being jeopardized, why did he wait so long before launching such aggressive action to recover the records? Agents reportedly learned about the additional material some two months earlier, although the exact timing is unclear.
Garland claims that he is "applying the law evenly, without fear or favor." That is an odd assertion from an attorney general who refused to enforce the law by arresting demonstrators who issued ugly threats outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court Justices in clear violation of federal statutes. And then there was his targeting of concerned parents who dared to complain to school boards about policies with which they disagreed. Is treating them as "domestic terrorists" Garland’s idea of sound law enforcement? In both cases, the attorney general bowed to the woke mob.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER
If upholding the rule of law and applying it "evenly" is so precious to Garland, why has there been no raid or indictment of Hunter Biden despite a trove of incriminating evidence that he ran multi-million-dollar foreign influence peddling schemes by selling access to his powerful father? As I noted in my last column, the attorney general appears to be running a protection racket for his boss, President Joe Biden, and his corrupt son.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Garland pretends that no one is above the law. But his actions suggest otherwise. Partisan allies receive special treatment while political opponents are persecuted and punished. Abuse of power and unequal application of the law are now the hallmarks of his poisonous tenure. The raid of Trump’s home that the attorney general personally approved is the latest illustration of his dangerous paradigm.