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Thursday, August 11, 2022

Do you view Kevin McCarthy as bright and sincere? Based on his track record, or what? Possibly primarily a Trump toady? Oh, my.

 After the Mar a Lago raid, McCarthy is reported as fomenting party-wide Angst and rage:

Evidently, the former president wasn’t the only one concerned with GOP officials who exercised restraint. Politico also reported yesterday:

Following the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called out some of his Republican colleagues who are taking the quieter “wait and see” approach. The GOP leader took to Facebook Monday, blasting a message of urgency to his colleagues that “NOW is the time to speak up and be LOUD.”

Specifically, the top House Republican’s message was just two sentences long: “If you are an elected Republican, and you are staying quiet while Democrats in Washington are abusing their power — you are the very reason they think they can get away with it. NOW is the time to speak up and be LOUD!”

There are a whole lot of problems packed into these 42 words. To hear McCarthy tell it, for example, Democrats not only control federal law enforcement — a dubious proposition in its own right given the role of career employees and a Trump-appointed FBI director — they’re also “abusing their power.” The minority leader’s evidence of this is, well, non-existent.

But it’s the second sentence that obviously matters more.

Traditionally, party leaders on Capitol Hill have worried about whether their members might do something irresponsible. McCarthy is worried House Republicans aren’t irresponsible enough.

Strib published as an op-ed a former high level FBI person saying basically, in longer and more measured words, if you'd think the FBI and DOJ would not be super careful in these circumstances you must have your head thrust into a dark place. 

There is no evidence McCarthy knows what the search warrant says, nor what the search yielded - but he doesn't fucking care. That is clear by his shoot first approach. 

McCarthy's track record from 2015 suggests perhaps why he sees law enforcement acting to enforce law as an evil act of coarse partisanship - he knows what he along with confederates back then have done and projects similar motives on others:

 

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, tried again to clean up remarks he made [...] "I did not intend to imply in any way that that work was political. Of course it is not, look at the way they have carried themselves out," he told Fox News' Bret Baier in an interview Thursday.

He continued, "The point I was trying to make - and I want to be very clear about this - I wasn't saying the committee was political. That committee is solely to get the truth out."

The remarks he sought to clarify were made Tuesday night. "Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?" said McCarthy, in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity. "But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen."

Ain't he a piece of work?Read the headline, and THINK.

More online political coverage:

 Politico - after news recently surfaced about Secret Service. DHS and DOD data scrubbing from before Biden took office -

While some senior Republicans privately brushed off conservatives’ calls for an investigation, noting that they need to see proof the search was a stunt rather than a by-the-books act, McCarthy’s tweet Monday night raises the political stakes of the moment considerably for the entire conference.

And even one prominent former Freedom Caucus member — turned potential Trump 2024 presidential primary rival — weighed in too.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked the Mar-a-Lago search on Twitter with similar Third World references, calling it “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents” and adding a dig at Democrats for seeking to boost IRS enforcement to help pay for their domestic agenda.

Politico again -

 In the absence of more detailed information about the investigation, it’s unclear what potential crimes DOJ is probing. Notably, Trump — after a fierce campaign against Clinton in which he called for her to be jailed for her handling of classified material — signed a law in 2018 that stiffened the penalty for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents from one year to five years, turning it into a felony offense.

That was the same statute that just three years earlier Petraeus pleaded guilty to in order to avoid a felony conviction.

While both the DOJ and FBI have been silent amid calls they further explain the context of the Mar-a-Lago search, they are not the only ones in possession of relevant information.

Trump is in perhaps the best position to reveal more details about what transpired on Monday. The former president has access to the full inventory of items that federal investigators were seeking as well as what was taken from his estate during the search. He or his lawyers were almost certainly presented with a copy of the search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago — though not the underlying affidavit or other supplemental materials, which are usually kept confidential until charges are issued or a case is closed. In addition, Trump can speak to the nature of any potentially classified material that may have been the basis for the search and whether he took steps to declassify any of it as he left office.

 [...] A day before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump named seven administration officials as his representatives to the National Archives. Among them were his chief of staff, Mark Meadows; White House counsel Pat Cipollone; his deputies Patrick Philbin, Scott Gast and Michael Purpura; national security attorney John Eisenberg; and Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel chief Steven Engel.

[...]  It’s unclear whether all seven of the officials remain authorized representatives for Trump, but the former president has also recently added at least two additional representatives: reporter John Solomon and former Pentagon official Kash Patel.

Patel told Breitbart in May that Trump had declassified the materials he removed to Mar-a-Lago, even though the documents still had classified markings on them. As president, Trump had total power to declassify any classified material in the government’s possession.