Thursday, August 11, 2022

Reacting To Rampant Conspiracy Theories? Unusually, An FBI Search Warrant May Be Unsealed

Posted by Peter Quennell


Context

This unusual move was announced mid afternoon. Many YouTubes are already up.

Donald Trump actually has a copy of the warrant okayed by a judge for Monday’s FBI search of his Florida place. But he has not released it, and so conspiracy theories are running rampant - such as that the house has been extensively bugged.

A judge will now decide whether we get to be put in the picture. Big nail-biter is whether Trump’s lawyers will fight the warrant’s release.

The director of the FBI is not only a lifelong Republican but was also installed by Trump in 2017. It seems the judge who signed the search warrant was also appointed by Trump.

Buzz around New York is that the papers seized by the FBI Monday may relate to extensive dealings with Vladimir Putin. But with the US as Global Ground Zero for conspiracy theories, keep your powder dry!

See YouTube watchers comments here (scroll down)

Posted by Peter Quennell on 08/11/22 at 05:32 PM in

Comments

The reason some are thinking that this may relate to national security is that one or two of the FBI agents who did the search work in the FBI’s counter-espionage arm.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 08/11/22 at 06:20 PM | #

Halfway through Thursday evening here, all of the discussion on news TV became dominated by new Washington Post and New York Times reports. These are behind their paywalls, this is from the Times.

Mr. Garland provided no details. But the person briefed on the matter said investigators had been concerned about material from what the government calls “special access programs,” a designation even more classified than “top secret” that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities.

So the sources state that the material the FBI collected was in part nuclear secrets - aspects of nuclear weapons, which might be traded for a good price to the Russians or Chinese seems the best bet.

A grand jury had issued a subpoena for the return of the material a while back, but that had been ignored by Trump. He has not said a public word since Garland’s bombshell, and Republicans who had been angrily pushing conspiracy theories seem AWOL tonight.

Trump’s lawyers have to 3:00 pm Friday to fill a motion with a south Florida judge to try to prevent the Justice Department from releasing the warrant and list of materials collected.

Trump & followers have raised a huge outcry about the search and demanded that it be explained, so it’d be sort of weird for the Trump team to argue “No, you cannot be told of the reasons for the search after all.”

Posted by Peter Quennell on 08/12/22 at 12:06 AM | #

Friday midday: the last para above seems to be proving correct: the legal team have not as yet come up with a facesaving way to block the warrant’s release.

Today there are numerous mini conspiracy theories, but they seem half-hearted and disjointed. The nuclear secrets seem likely to be about strategy and not about bomb-building.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 08/12/22 at 11:32 AM | #

Sunday recap. Surely a world record for the speed with which so many inflammatory conspiracy theories flared up and fizzled out?!

Here is the most prominent nationally of the Republican columnists summarizing this past week’s arc and critical of those who did damage to the Republican cause.

http://truejustice.org/ee/documents/perugia/2022MarALargoFBI.pdf

There remain several intriguing mysteries which may or may not result in rational explanations in months to come - in this neck of the woods 100% of everybody seem to be scratching their heads and uttering “cuckoo” and the like.

1. What was in all of the secret documents? Why were they even in the White House? Especially the beyond-top-secret ones?

2. They seem to have weighed well over a ton. How did they make their way out of the White House secure room to the residence several floors above, to be packed along with the personal luggage for Mar A Largo?

3. Who was involved in the moving of the docs and their squirrelling away at the other end? It seems that all concerned could be charged.

4. The National Archives and FBI had been trying to get the docs back for over a year. Why put up any resistance at all? Why hand over only half of the docs a few months ago?

5. Were their contents shared with anyone overseas? Did something show up on the intelligence radar? What put the FBI and judge into emergency mode?

The Italians cooperate a lot with the FBI and we have often posted on this. Putting the conspiracy theories to bed so decisively was rather nice work.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 08/14/22 at 10:32 AM | #
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