Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant Travesty
DOJ Unseals Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant
Judicial Watch Sues for ‘Russia Hoax’ Records Trump Ordered Released
Critical Race Theory Is a Threat to Our National Security
Leftist Attack on Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban
DOJ Unseals Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant
The warrant that authorized the search of former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago was released today following our court filing seeking release of all FBI warrant materials.
We’re pleased that our legal pressure forced the partial release of warrant materials about the Biden administration’s political raid on the home of former President Trump. We expect and demand the underlying warrant affidavit and other materials be immediately disclosed.
On August 9, we filed a motion asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal as soon as possible the search warrant materials used by the FBI to raid the Florida home (U.S. v. Sealed Search Warrant (No. 9:22-mj-08332)).
The Justice Department agreed that the warrant should be released in its filing:
The government hereby requests that the Court unseal the Notice of Filing and its attachment (Docket Entry 17), absent objection by former President Trump. The attachment to that Notice consists of:
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- The search warrant signed and approved by the Court on August 5, 2022, including Attachments A and B; and
- The redacted Property Receipt listing items seized pursuant to the search, filed with the Court on August 11, 2022
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The press and the public enjoy a qualified right of access to criminal and judicial proceedings and the judicial records filed therein.
Our legal pressure forced an important first step by the Biden Justice Department to disclose Attorney General Garland’s role in the abusive Trump raid.
Initially, the Albany Times Union and the New York Times joined us in filing for the unsealing of the warrant by filing an amicus letter and motion respectively. Other interests later joined in the effort.
Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart had ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to file a response to Judicial Watch’s Motion to Unseal the warrant and supporting materials behind the FBI raid of President Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago by 5p.m. on August 15, 2022.
Due to multiple organizations filing to unseal the warrant, Judge Reinhart ordered that, “To avoid the need for individualized orders on any future motion(s) to unseal, it is ORDERED that the Government shall file an omnibus response to all motions to unseal …”
Yesterday, President Trump issued a public statement “ENCOURAGING the immediate release of those documents.”
Our August 9 motion stated:
Judicial Watch is investigating the potential politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice and whether the FBI and the Justice Department are abusing their law enforcement powers to harass a likely future political opponent of President Biden.
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The public has an urgent and substantial interest in understanding the predicate for the execution of the unprecedented search warrant of the private residence of a former president and likely future political opponent…. [N]o official explanation or information has been released about the search. As of the filing of this motion, the public record consists solely of speculation and inuendo. In short, the historical presumption of access to warrant materials vastly outweighs any interest the government may have in keeping the materials under seal.
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Given the political context, and the highly unusual action of executing a search warrant at the residence of a former President and likely future political opponent, it is essential that the public understands as soon as possible the basis for the government’s action. Any government interest in securing the identities of witnesses and confidential sources, if any, may be addressed by appropriate redactions from the search warrant affidavit.
The U.S. Constitution and federal law give unreviewable authority to President Trump to take whatever records he wishes at the end of his presidency. The Biden administration’s dishonest depiction of personal records of President Trump it illicitly seized during the raid as “classified” is further demonstration that the raid was a brazen act of raw political abuse.
Judicial Watch Sues for ‘Russia Hoax’ Records Trump Ordered Released
The Obama-Biden administrations and Deep State spying on Trump and his associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history. And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an absolute right to see!
We sued the Department of Justice for records President Trump ordered declassified and released the day before he left office. The records relate to “Crossfire Hurricane,” the controversial spy operation against President Trump, his 2016 presidential campaign, and other Trump associates, and have yet to be made public by the Biden Administration (Judicial Watch, Inc. v U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:22-cv-02264)).
We filed suit against the DOJ after it failed to respond to a February 17, 2022, FOIA request for:
All records regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that were provided to the White House by the Department of Justice on or about December 30, 2020. For purposes of clarification, the records sought are those described in a January 19, 2021 Presidential Memorandum (see https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/ ).
All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and any official or employee of any other branch, department, agency, or office of the federal government regarding the declassification and release of the records described in part one of this request.
Trump’s memo authorized the declassification and release of the records:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:
Section 1. Declassification and Release. At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.
I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure. I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.
I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.
My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.
A Just the News report details that the documents include “transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.”
We have taken a leading role in uncovering the Obama/Deep State spying and other abuses targeting Trump and his associates.
In May 2020, our litigation uncovered the “electronic communication” (EC) that officially launched the counterintelligence investigation, termed “Crossfire Hurricane,” of President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The document was written by Strzok.
In March 2019 we released heavily redacted records from the DOJ that reveal Bruce Ohr remained in regular contact with former British spy and Fusion GPS contractor Christopher Steele after Steele was terminated by the FBI in November 2016 for revealing to the media his position as an FBI confidential informant.
In August 2019, we uncovered “302” report material from FBI interviews with Bruce Ohr, showing that in November 2016, Ohr said that “reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia were going to the Clinton Campaign” and “Jon Winer at the U.S. State Department and the FBI.” The documents also showed that Ohr knew that Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and others were “talking to Victoria Nuland at the U.S. State Department.” (A Form 302 is used by FBI agents to summarize the interviews that they conduct and contains information from the notes taken during the interview.)
In August 2018, the Justice Department (DOJ) admitted in a court filing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial FISA warrants. Our litigation also uncovered the secret FISA warrants that confirmed the FBI and DOJ misled the courts in withholding the material information that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC were behind the “intelligence” used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team.
Also, in August of that year, we discovered FBI records about Christopher Steele, the former British spy, hired with Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funds, who authored the infamous dossier targeting President Trump during the presidential campaign. The documents show that Steele was cut off as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) after he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to a third party. The documents show at least 11 FBI payments to Steele in 2016 and document that he was admonished for unspecified reasons in February 2016.
Critical Race Theory Is a Threat to Our National Security
It’s not far-fetched to conclude that leftists are deliberately trying to destroy our country. That could be the end result from the infusion of Marxist thinking into our military. I explore that possibility in this piece published by the Washington Examiner:
The U.S. military is being attacked from within. But instead of rifles and tanks, the weapon being used to dismantle our armed forces is progressive ideology.
The latest target is the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which was established by George Washington and is where our rising generation of Army officers are schooled. Government watchdog Judicial Watch just uncovered that West Point leadership has been force-feeding cadets the tenets of critical race theory, a Marxist theory that stokes racial separatism.
As a result of two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the Department of Defense, Judicial Watch forced the release of more than 600 pages of PowerPoint slides, handouts, and other curricula used to educate West Point cadets on topics such as “modern day slavery in the USA.”
The documents from West Point reveal an assault on cadets in the form of race-based shaming that paints one race as an oppressor and another as the victim. In one presentation, for example, titled “‘Race and the Invisible Hand’: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs,” West Point cadets were taught that white people are malicious oppressors. The academy’s training materials also described whiteness as “a standpoint or place from which white people look at themselves and the rest of society.”
Cadets were directed to “consider how the contemporary issues that relate to race, gender, and sexuality apply to the army and how they impact the army officer.” The materials went on to explain that CRT’s concepts “are essential for future military officers to understand and fully absorb.” And, if that’s not enough, students learned the fundamentals of feminist theory and queer theory in a three-credit social sciences class titled “The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality.”
CRT is a threat to our nation. It arises from the Marxist intellectual framework against which the United States fought during the Cold War. And although the U.S. defeated the imminent military threat of Marxist communism in the 1980s, it lives on beneath the banner of CRT and has infiltrated every aspect of American society, from cultural institutions to the workplace and now the U.S. military. Allowing CRT to permeate military education betrays those who fought and still defend this nation against the Marxist totalitarian menace.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration has made critical race theory a primary governing principle. Indeed, Gen. Darryl Williams, the West Point superintendent responsible for the CRT abuse of the cadets in his care, was given a fourth star by Biden and promoted to commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa.
Congress can end this insanity, but the Democratic-controlled congress is set to push back on any attempts to restrict CRT and its inclusion in our military’s education programs.
It’s no wonder, then, that the U.S. Army is projected to fall 10,000 soldiers short this fiscal year . Why would American patriots join today’s Army, which seems too often to oppose fundamental American values?
Thankfully, the abuse at West Point is not going unnoticed. West Point graduates recently signed a letter objecting to the teaching of radical agendas at the academy. The letter points out that by teaching CRT and hosting progressive guest speakers, West Point violated U.S. Army regulations by permitting political activism on campus. And, as the graduates argued, CRT indoctrination at West Point does more harm than good by placing race at the forefront of U.S. military education.
The military has long sought to embody Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that people “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” through its commitment to character and common purpose. In fact, the military uniform is a great equalizer that has long united people regardless of color, class, gender, and religion. But by sowing racial divisions between cadets, CRT fosters resentment and anger instead of the unity essential for an effective fighting force.
Studies show that bonds of unity play a significant role on the front lines. Nearly all soldiers report a “fused” identity with their battalions akin to the fusion between themselves and their own family members, according to a University of Oxford study . When asked which group they felt most fused to, 45% of soldiers chose their own battalions over their families. Manufacturing political and racial tensions between cadets in training could create disastrous consequences for battalion cohesion and Army leadership down the road — which, from our enemies’ perspective, could be the point.
The ideological attack on West Point cadets (and the woke leadership in our military’s other academies ) must stop. Such blatantly racist, anti-American propaganda not only threatens to radicalize the next generation of U.S. Army leadership, but it undermines the purpose of our military: to identify, confront, and destroy the enemy. If critical race theory persists in the training of future officers, they will see the enemy as their fellow American.
Leftist Attack on Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban
As we endure the brazen onslaught of leftist thinking in the United States, it is reassuring to see that a foreign country, in an unlikely location, is celebrating freedom and Christian, pro-family values. Chris Farrell, our director of investigations and research, has written about this nation, Hungary, for The Washington Times.
The left hates that a popular, conservative government prospers in the heart of central Europe. When that country cheerfully maintains its sovereignty and distinct national identity while belonging to the European Union and NATO, elites bristle. Making things worse, the country self-identifies as a Christian, pro-family nation, and aided more than 700,000 refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine.
Hungary and the reelected Prime Minister Viktor Orban are in the crosshairs of attack for daring to be Hungarian. “How dare they?” chuff anointed arbiters of European moral norms, legal debate and wealth redistribution. “Journalists” and opinion leaders are quick to join in slinging accusations of various “-isms,” phobias and mind-reading analyses.
Adding to the indignation of the post-Western, globalists-in-charge is that Mr. Orban was a keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas last week. Mr. Orban gave his fearless, inspiring speech to a packed house, well-received with standing ovations. Mr. Orban told the Texas crowd that Hungary was the “Lone Star State of Europe,” while engaging in brutal truth-telling that Americans almost never hear:
“If somebody has doubts whether progressive liberals and communists are the same, just ask us, Hungarians. We fought them both, and I can tell you: They are the same.”
“Obama … tried to force us to change the Fundamental law of Hungary, and delete Christian and national values from it. Do you get it? The leading power of the free world wanted to force us to change our constitution according to a globalist liberal concept. How bizarre!”
“… Today’s progressives … separate Western Civilization from its Christian roots once again. They are crossing a line that should never be crossed. If you separate Western Civilization from its Judeo-Christian heritage, the worst things in history happen.”
“To sum up: The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone. Full stop! End of discussion!”
In the corridors of Brussels and leftist editorial Zoom meetings, the same objective was made clear: “Mr. Orban and his message must be stopped!”
But Mr. Orban predicted their reactions: “I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: ‘Far-right European racist and antisemite strongman, the Trojan horse of Putin, holds speech at conservative conference.’” Mr. Orban was correct, because the “go-to” technique to silence anyone making the left nervous is “the smear,” straight out of the Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals,” and it often works.
Before CPAC, Mr. Orban made an annual address to the Hungarian minority in Romania. The Washington Post and their ilk will not give you Mr. Orban’s full quote with context, too busy saving keystrokes so they can write “Nazi” and “authoritarian” while advocating for the EU to withhold funds from Hungary. Here is what Mr. Orban actually said:
“The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: The claim … that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race. This is a historical and semantic sleight of hand, because it conflates two different things. There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work and relocate. So, for example, in the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: We are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland. And, given a favorable alignment of stars and a following wind, these peoples merge together in a kind of Hungaro-Pannonian sauce, creating their own new European culture. This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race. This is why we fought at Nandorfehervar/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, and … in still older times — the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers.”
Here is the essence of Mr. Orban’s statement: Europeans are from Europe; Turks and Arabs are from their own homelands. Fundamentally, that’s it. Various peoples are indigenous to their regions with distinct identities, cultures, history, languages, religions. Mr. Orban was simply advocating for the Magyar people. They are allowed to have a home and identity and hand down their heritage through generations. France and Germany are free to make their own decisions and value their own identity, culture, history, language and religion — or not.
Self-determination is the freedom to choose without external compulsion — the power of a nation to decide how it will be governed without the influence of another country. The United Nations Charter guarantees the right to self-determination in the framework of international law and diplomacy.
Now is the time to consider how a country like Hungary can make choices to advance its own interests — based on faith, family, history, culture and tradition — without the threat of compulsion or intimidation, or subjection to false claims of racism and bigotry as a sleazy political trick.
Until next week …
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