Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Nightmare Continues

Hello! It’s the weekend, this is The Weekender. ☕

We’re slowly learning more about the FBI searches on Mar-a-Lago last week.

It’s a storyline that’s dominated nearly two weeks of coverage and will likely extend further into the future. But unlike previous Trump investigations – Mueller, two impeachments, those into his organization – for this one, Trump lacks the protective effects of being an occupant of the presidency.

The circumstances are different in other ways, too. Trump’s legal team, so to speak, is less than stellar, with one key attorney having crucial experience as a former OAN host and the other with a past repping a parking garage firm. He also tempted fate by holding on to the records, timelines show, first withholding their release after a year of negotiations and requests, after a grand jury subpoena, ending with the search warrant executed last week.

The mystery of what, exactly, the records were that Trump held and that the FBI sought also remains open. One report suggests that they may be related to nuclear weapons – Trump has a long and, shall we say, bombastic history associated with that issue.

As does the question of who is talking. As the DOJ put it in a filing on Monday, the probe is both “high-profile” and concerns cooperating witnesses, some of whom have information related to other, separate “high-profile investigations.”

Two people who have talked extensively about Trump and federal records in recent months happen to be the two people he appointed as his representatives to NARA, giving them nearly unfettered access to documents from his administration: former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) staffer Kash Patel, and right-wing journalist John Solomon. The pair have talked about all the things that they wanted to do with special access to secret records, but differ about where the records in question were stored. That could end up being very, very key.

More on other news below. Let’s dig in.

— Josh Kovensky

Demonizing The Tax Police … Again

Republicans of all stripes are telling anyone who will listen that, thanks to Democrats’ just-passed Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS will hire 87,000 new armed agents who will kick down your door and potentially kill you. That is not an exaggeration.

Aside from the very obvious possibility that some gullible, unstable person will take these outlandishly false claims at face value and act on them, the conspiracy theory does some subtle work for Republicans.

For years they’ve been attacking the agency, ginning up largely nothingburger scandals that help them decimate its budget and demoralize its workforce. The upshot of a hobbled tax police force? Free rein for the very rich and corporations whose finances take many more resources to investigate and who are armed with armies of lawyers to keep the auditors at bay.

Despite the Republican howls, the IRS got $80 billion in much-needed funds which will help it beef up its auditing of the rich, modernize its egregiously outdated technology and improve its currently abhorrent customer service.

But Republicans will have another chance to weaken the agency when it comes time for annual appropriations — get ready for a showdown.

Read my piece on these dynamics here. 

— Kate Riga

‘2000 Mules’ Crew Was SO Close To Sharing Their Proof, They Swear

The stars of “2,000 Mules,” the voter fraud conspiracy theory film, gathered their biggest fans in Arizona recently for an event called “The Pit,” a months-in-the-making extravaganza where, finally, they were set to release the raw data behind their claim that a vast criminal conspiracy had stolen the 2020 election from Donald Trump. 

Alas, this did not happen. “It was immediately attacked by Chinese actors,” Gregg Phillips, who popularized the lie that millions of undocumented people voted illegally in 2016, claimed of the mountains of data. “It basically wiped it clean.” Not to worry, though: The team kept on working and released a website, open.ink, where they said they’d upload — finally! — all of their proof. At press time, the website, shockingly, was still blank.

— Matt Shuham

• In any other context, it’d be a shocking fall from grace: a once-ascendant, Fox News celebrity congresswoman, who made leadership in her second year in office, is ousted by a political neophyte who’d once campaigned to get her incumbent opponent elected to the Senate. But there’s nothing shocking about Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) primary defeat to Trump-endorsed lawyer Harriet Hageman.
• Right-wing Christian media kicked into high gear in the days following the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, coalescing around a defense of former President Donald Trump based on a smorgasbord of persecution complexes, whataboutism, conspiracy theories, lies, and misinformation about law enforcement and the judicial process. The Christian right and its GOP allies are counting on their base consuming a steady diet of these radio shows, podcasts, social media posts, and email blasts, tuning out any coverage that conflicts with their image of Trump as both a virile hero and a victim besieged by radical leftists at the FBI. Read more from Sarah Posner here.
• CPAC Wants The Power To Fire All Government Employees—Including The FBI: Don’t confuse “The Blue” with the FBI or the Department of Justice: conservatives certainly don’t. While cops have attained a crucial place as heroes in the conservative imagination, FBI leadership has, over the last few years, become the villains.
• And finally: Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday night seemed a little worried about the way ex-President Donald Trump’s defense team has been handling the Justice Department’s investigation into the classified documents that were stashed at Mar-a-Lago. Ingraham, an attorney herself who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was baffled by the Trump lawyers’ decision not to file a motion during a hearing earlier in the day to unseal the affidavit that supported the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search warrant. So Ingraham invited Christina Bobb, one of the lawyers, on the show to “clear things up” in an interview that ended up looking like a coaching session. Read more here.

“The temperature has to be brought down in the country. If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen.”

– Donald Trump ranting about the FBI’s raid on his Mar-a-Lago resort in a Fox interview on Monday.

You see, this is what’s going to spark civil war and bring America to its knees, certainly not anything else that happened after the 2020 election.

And Trump, with his offer to do “whatever we can do to help,” is precisely the level-headed man the country needs to turn down the temperature. He’s simply aghast at how toxic everything’s become now! How did we get here??

— Cristina Cabrera