The FBI Raid at Mar-a-Lago Means Nothing at All.

How do I say this without pissing off all my liberal friends? Okay, I’ll just go ahead and say it.

As much as I think that Donald Trump was the worst President this country has ever had, as much as I think Orange Shithead is responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans through his gross incompetence, negligence and politicized response to Covid-19, as much as I wouldn’t mind it one bit if OS spent several years at the federal rest home in Butner, NC, I also believe that much ado is being made out of nothing re. the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid.

The FBI has a very good forensics lab. It also does some serious work helping understaffed and underpaid local police departments solve serious crimes. It also has some smart people working in its computer science division, including a couple of nerds who even know how to write some decent code.

But beyond that, the FBI is basically a warehouse holding an enormous collection of gossip which has been growing steadily since ‘the Queen,’ as Richard Nixon used to call J. Edgar Hoover, first got the agency recognized as a federal law-enforcement operation in 1935.

The biggest problem which has always faced the FBI is that it only has jurisdiction over crimes which occur in multiple states, because otherwise crime is a local or state-level affair, which means that the particular local or state jurisdiction has control. And when we think about crime, we think about criminal behavior which happens right where we live which is why the local news every evening always starts off with a story about a stick-up at the convenience store or a hit-and-run where the offending driver has yet to be found.

I had a friend who was an FBI agent in the Chicago office. He spent at least one day every week going around the long-term parking lots at O’Hare Airport looking for stolen cars. Otherwise, he basically spent his career interviewing people who were suspected of doing this or that but were rarely charged with actually doing anything beyond some mail-order scam which because it involved the mail, by definition was an interstate thing.

Maybe twice or three times over the 15 years he was in Chicago, the team which responded to bank robberies was actually called out into the field because, as he told me, you had to be a real idiot to try and rob a bank.

Now let’s look at the Mar-a-Lago raid and let’s assume that Orange Shithead actually took home some documents that he should have given to the National Archive because they were ‘official papers’ or worse, even contained some so-called ‘classified’ stuff.

Exactly what would have been these big secrets that Trump could have been trying to steal? Some doodles he made on a notepad while he was taking a shit? A note he passed to a Secret Service agent during a Cabinet meeting that he was ready for lunch?

The White House isn’t Los Alamos. They don’t do any ‘secret’ work in the West Wing. What they do is sit there all day and schmooze about the latest goings-on in the Executive branch. Who’s getting divorced, who’s getting laid, who’s not getting laid – strategic issues like that.

The idea that there would be one, single piece of information floating around the White House which would create a security problem if it got into the ‘wrong hands’ is a joke. But when you’re running a so-called law-enforcement agency like the FBI, you need to make sure that everything you do is very, very important because otherwise, God forbid, you might not get the budget increase you are going to ask for in the next fiscal year.

God Bless America. Land of the free, home of the brave and let’s make sure that every secret in D.C. only gets leaked to The Failing New York Times.