TOC Ready Room 24 August 2022: Notes on the Boxes of Mar-a-Lago; the end of an old order continues

The big news from the last 48 hours is that the Biden White House actually did know in advance of the Mar-a-Lago raid, and in fact had been involved in the issue of the documents held at Mar-a-Lago since at least April of 2022 (and probably earlier).  So the original claim that the Biden White House didn’t know about it was false.

That point has been gone over vigorously since it came out Monday night.  But the latest information on the Mar-a-Lago/classified information dust-up also confirms my previous discussion of the classification issue (and here).

In addition to that discussion, I offer as preparation an excellent 7-odd minutes with Megyn Kelly and former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright, which packages a pretty comprehensive overview of the things that matter.

World crisis: Raiders of the lost files

Those who identify the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago as a crisis of the Republic are quite correct, and I am gravely concerned it’s a bigger crisis than anyone is thinking. 

The reason for that is what ensued a few hours after the raid, which reportedly occurred in the “pre-dawn” hours of 8 August 2022 in Palm Beach.

Numerous TV news commentators pointed out Monday evening that nothing like this raid on the former president’s home has happened before in U.S. history.  Americans aren’t the only ones who know that.  We’re also not the only ones who know that proper procedure was ignored by the raiding team, according to witnesses.  The FBI team should have allowed Trump’s lawyers to be present everywhere items were seized, but didn’t (the lawyers were reportedly excluded altogether);

TOC Ready Room 22 July 2022: Biden returns from MidEast, with prejudice; CNN v. Bannon; Bonus tag

We’re on deck with a full-up Ready Room today, after a relatively extended blogging hiatus.  Strap in for some serious (if selective) situational awareness.

Biden’s Middle East adventure

It turns out to be a good thing I didn’t get the segment on President Biden’s Middle East trip posted on Sunday, as originally planned.  Quite a bit has ensued since Sunday, all of it fallout from the essential failure of Biden’s junket, and the fallout is significant.  It’s what needs to be highlighted up front.

Here’s the short list of fallout items.  We’ll look at a few implications with each topic.

On Sunday, a senior Iranian official made a rare statement about nuclear weapons, and baldly averred that Iran is capable of producing them.

TOC Ready Room 29 March 2022: Eyes front (not back), on attacks in Israel

This will be a brief Ready Room; basically little more than a string of tweets.  But it’s important. The subject is the terror attacks in Israel in recent days, which have now taken the lives of 11 people.  The first was a gruesome mass-knifing attack, the other two shooting attacks.

🔴#BREAKING: In addition to Bnei Brak, another shooting was reported in Ramat Gan.https://t.co/k6YGrP5q86

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) March 29, 2022

Terror using small arms is not unusual in Israel, but the attacks we’ve been seeing also don’t fit recent patterns.

TOC Ready Room 10 March 2022: NFZs, convoys, and Iran follies, oh my

Keeping it short and sweet for now, as things keep updating on the long-running Phase II of the “IT in Russiagate” topic.  The first subject in today’s Ready Room grab-bag is the no-fly zone proposal for Ukraine.

It’s a bad idea.  All I will do here is copy in an email sent earlier with my reflections on the matter.  They were forwarded in response to a piece by former Senator Joe Lieberman in the Wall Street Journal (apologies for the paywall).

The email text: