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The news cycle this week has been understandably dominated by the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, where armed agents were supposedly looking for classified documents the FBI believes were improperly removed from the White House at the end of Trump’s term, in violation of federal law.
But the FBI raid is just a piece of a much larger story that’s playing out in slow motion and in plain sight: the rigging of the 2024 presidential election.
Much like the 2020 election, which wasn’t stolen so much as rigged months in advance to give Joe Biden an advantage that all but guaranteed his victory, the 2024 election is being rigged to ensure that Trump either cannot run or, if he does run, cannot win.
First, consider the FBI raid. No serious person believes that a documents dispute was the real purpose of the raid. The idea that the FBI would search the home of a former president and potential 2024 GOP candidate over an ongoing (and not uncommon) disagreement over presidential records with the National Archives is absurd on its face.
In his brief and self-congratulatory press conference Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he personally authorized the search on Trump’s home, that the Justice Department “does not take such a decision lightly,” and that it always seeks to use a “less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”
But if that were true, it more or less rules out the theory that the FBI was looking for classified documents. The disagreement between the National Archives and Trump has been ongoing for months, and Trump’s lawyers have been cooperating with the relevant authorities. Raiding Trump’s private residence over that — and in the process triggering a political crisis — makes zero sense.
As some expert observers have pointed out, including my colleague Margot Cleveland, a far more plausible explanation is that the FBI was perhaps on a fishing expedition, looking for evidence that could implicate Trump in the Jan. 6 riot. It’s no secret that Democrats and the Jan. 6 Committee want Garland to charge Trump with “seditious conspiracy” in hopes of making it impossible for Trump to run in 2024. In that case, a documents dispute with the National Archives would be nothing more than a flimsy pretext to get into Trump’s residence and look for incriminating evidence related to Jan.
