Here’s motive on the Mar-a-Lago raid; or, Dog-paddling outside the OODA loop

Divining the principal purpose of the DOJ/FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022 hasn’t really been that hard.  The timing and its juxtaposition with the Justice Department’s motion to substitute itself for FBI employees, as defendant in Trump’s RICO lawsuit over Russiagate, have produced a “speaking timeline.”

But it’s good to know that one of the two most important events in that timeline yields a treasure trove of motive for DOJ to seize materials from Mar-a-Lago.  That event is former president Trump’s filing of an amended complaint in the RICO lawsuit, which he did on 21 June 2022.

I’ve been threatening to inspect the amendments to the lawsuit, and have now completed that extensive task (So You Don’t Have To).  The short version up front:  the amendments include a raft of details that weren’t in the original complaint, although many of them have been known for years (having come from sources like the DOJ IG report on the FISA process, and summaries of findings about Russiagate/Spygate from Senate and House committees).

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Two pings on the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago: Classification kerfuffle and Trump’s RICO suit

There is a whole lot else to say, so my apologies up front for not saying it.  I just want to keep this short (well, shorter than it would otherwise be).  Consider this an open invitation to say whatever seems to live loud within you and demand saying.

Ideally, the comments on classification of documents, presidential authority, and Trump’s holding of documents out of office would be even shorter than they’re going to be.

The bottom line on everything is that Trump was the president until 20 January 2021, and in most cases the president isn’t subject to the same agency regulations and procedures everyone else is.

That doesn’t make a clean single-color area for the president to operate in, however.  Rather, it generates a gray area largely governed by negation.

A work-in-progress timeline surrounding Feb 2017 Daniel Jones meeting, including the ‘Trump’s insurance broker’ angle

With a great deal happening, it’s important to move some things out there before they are fully developed and analyzed, largely because some of the event dates are remarkably coincident with known events from the Spygate timeline. 

The anchor point for this rough-condition timeline is early February 2017, when on successive days Michael Sussmann met with officials at the CIA to urge on them his trove of purported Alfa Bank-Trump data (9 February 2017), and John Podesta met with Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, along with former Dianne Feinstein staffer Daniel Jones (on 10 February 2017), who in the same timeframe started a non-profit that hired Fusion to continue its anti-Trump work from 2016.

These dates are of particular interest, and not only because John Durham has discussed the Sussmann-CIA meeting in his court filings in the Sussmann false-statement case.

Ongoing: Five top-level pings on the Russiagate/Spygate maneuver war

We recently passed the five-year mark of the public breaking of the Russiagaet/Spygate saga (which I reckon to the day the Steele dossier burst forth upon us, 10 January 2017), and a brief stock-taking is in order.

To keep these points crisply punctuated, they will be brief.  This is an overview, not an in-depth treatment. 

I include here the points I consider essential to useful analysis of the “-gates.”  There is a very great deal more that can be said, but these are the points that keep us on track.

Ping One

The unclubbable Mr. Trump: China, Ukraine, and a surprise banking oversight action

On 20 March, we checked in with a story from the period 2014-2016, when the French bank BNP Paribas was, initially, greenlighted by the Obama administration to do business with Iran, as sanctions were relaxed, and then months later was hit by U.S. government authorities with the biggest settlement forfeiture in banking history for a prior record of sanctions violations (including sanctions on Iran).

In the interim between the first development (January 2014) and the second (June 2014), BNP Paribas flagged – to UK officials – a suspicious transaction by the owner of Burisma, Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.  The date of the notification, March 2014, fell in the period when Vice President Joe Biden was holding frequent phone conversations with top Ukrainian officials as the “Maidan Revolution” crisis expanded.  About a month after BNP Paribas alerted the UK to Zlochevsky – who had fled Ukraine in February 2014 – Hunter Biden and Devon Archer joined Burisma’s board, and payments from the company began flowing to them.