The FBI raided the home of the former President of the United States on Monday. Donald Trump confirmed the Feds descended on Mar-a-Lago in a statement, adding: "They even broke into my safe!" He also used that message to kick off the cycle of blistering outrage and conspiracy-mongering that has already consumed the right, even with a number of Fox News stars currently on vacation. The FBI was naturally blamed, despite the fact that it was serving a search warrant signed by a federal judge and its director, Christopher Wray, was appointed by...Donald Trump. The calls to defund or abolish the FBI came raining down immediately from the far right, an interesting pivot to "defund the police" in an election year. The Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, tweeted at Attorney General Merrick Garland promising extensive oversight should Republicans retake that chamber in November. "Preserve your documents," he added, seemingly without a shred of irony. Meanwhile, none of these people actually know anything about the details of the case or the raid. They're just snapping to attention, doing the Leader's work.
The whole conspiratorial meltdown threatened to obscure the actual question of why the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the former president. The most straightforward answer was that it was related to the boxes of documents Trump took down to Mar-a-Lago in possible violation of the Presidential Records Act. Some of these documents were reportedly classified, and the Washington Post found that some "are so sensitive they may not be able to be described in forthcoming inventory reports in an unclassified way." This is in addition to Trump's reportedly constant destruction of presidential records, including by flushing papers down the toilet. What a fine coda to a presidency that was ushered into existence in part thanks to a scandal over Hillary Clinton's document retention practices. (Never mind that it began with a bunch of Trump White House staffers using private email for public business.) Anyway, multiple outlets including the New York Times and the Post cited law-enforcement sources to report that the raid was related to Trump's handling of classified documents.
Just as a basic development, the raid is darkly historic. But in addition to that, there's the fact that when the watching world got wind that the former President of the United States had the cops on his doorstep, no one could be exactly sure which criminal investigation it was all in connection to. If it were related to the Fulton County district attorney's probe into his attempt to stuff the ballot box in Georgia, or the investigations pursued by New York State or the Manhattan DA into his business practices, they wouldn't have sent the Feds. But this raid could also have related to the Justice Department's investigation into January 6, which has reportedly picked up steam amid the cascading revelations of the January 6 Committee's probe in Congress. We are at the point where there are any number of reasons the most recent commander-in-chief could find the uniforms at his door, and still millions of people hang on his every word about how the whole world is just conspiring against him.
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.
