Handy Timeline Shows Biden White House Set Up Mar-A-Lago Raid
Instead, deputy WHITE HOUSE Counsel came up with a pretext for a “special access request” to obtain those records.
Photo credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
America First Legal has put together a comprehensive timeline, gleaned from communications among the National Archives (NARA), FBI, Jack Smith’s office and the White House, showing that the massive, armed shock-and-awe FBI raid on Mar-A-Lago and subsequent indictment of Trump “was a sham prosecution that involved the White House from the start.”
A lot of this will be familiar to newsletter readers, as we’ve been reporting pieces of the timeline all along, as they gradually became known. But AFL has done a masterful job of putting together the documentation --- the definitive proof --- of a set-up that started long before NARA officially referred the issue to the DOJ for investigation.
The Biden administration’s official position has always been that NARA referred the matter to DOJ in February 2022 after it received classified documents from Mar-A-Lago. This was to make the White House’s hands look clean, but they were lying about it. In 2023, AFL uncovered records confirming that the FBI had obtained access to these records through a “special access request” FROM THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE on behalf of the DOJ. (Yes, we covered this at the time.)
The whole scheme against Trump REALLY got underway in the summer of 2021, when then-Archivist of the United States David Ferriero expressed in a memo that he was “out of patience” over getting the materials at Mat-A-Lago and NARA General Counsel Gary Stern started “working on a letter to the AG.” Very significantly, this was still quite soon after Trump had left office, and NARA had been assured they’d “get to a resolution relatively soon” on the Trump boxes. That apparently didn’t matter. It looks as though Ferriero didn’t want a resolution but instead was itching to escalate the situation.
From AFL’s new report: “By September 2021, NARA had informed Biden’s WH Counsel and DOJ and drafted a letter to AG Garland seeking ‘assistance in the recovery of of Presidential Records’ even though, admittedly, the Presidential Records Act ‘has no explicit provision’ authorizing such a procedure.” (!!!)
However, Ferriero and Stern decided not to send the letter to Garland, because, they said, NARA’s ongoing engagement with Trump’s reps could “help clarify, if not actually resolve, the issue.”
Instead, deputy WHITE HOUSE Counsel came up with a pretext for a “special access request” to obtain those records. Here’s a clue from Stern’s internal memo to what was envisioned, and, yes, it meant invoking January 6:
“...We cannot go to DOJ while we are engaged in ongoing discussions with the White House and the Trump reps...
“We can address the social media issues on a separate track, which we should do in parallel with two related actions: 1) responding to the 1/6 Committee’s request for Trump’s 1/6 tweets; and 2) our plans to post in early October the Trump social media PRA [Presidential Records Act] records that we did not receive from the WH.”
We know for sure that they were already including the White House in talks because Stern mentions that they’d had a call the week before, “which served to get Deputy WH Counsel Jonathan Su up to speed on the issue...[T]his week Jonathan told me they are open to having [REDACTED NAMES] participate in a meeting with [MORE REDACTED NAMES] and possibly [STILL MORE REDACTED NAMES], the former Staff Secretary who was the principal source. Accordingly, they need access to [REDACTED] notes from the last administration, which we now hold --- so they will be making a special access request.”
In other words, the White House’s fingerprints are all over this, and they used a lie to try to wipe it clean.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1889469798846759125.html
WORLD NET DAILY has a good write-up on the timeline, reminding us of something else we found out later that the FBI did: stage a photoshoot on the floor of the area where documents had been kept, laying them out on the floor for a few quick snaps and even releasing them to the public. We would add that agents had even brought along those bright red ‘CLASSIFIED” tabs --- those were not in the original files --- to highlight the pages!
Of course, we also found out that Biden had squirreled away classified documents in multiple non-secure locations, including his own garage. It’s likely that most of these date from his years as U.S. Senator and Vice President, when (unlike President Trump) he had no authority to declassify and was not even supposed to remove them from their secure locations. He was deemed “an elderly man with a poor memory” and faced no consequences, even though someone that forgetful had no business remaining in that office. No need to go back over all that here.
But in the words of America First Legal, “This new timeline is further proof that Biden’s FBI raid on [Mar-A-Lago] was never about securing classified documents --- it was always about weaponizing the full force of the Department of Justice against Trump by whatever means necessary.”
This update on “The Mar-A-Lago Set-up” hasn’t received much attention yet, but it needs to. That raid was shocking, unforgivable, banana-republic stuff, and the emerging story behind it cannot be let go. More soon...
We all knew it, but just needed someone to uncover the truth. Thank goodness that has happened! Thank you for sharing the truth with us!
Thank you for being Mike Huckabee!🙏🙏🙏🇺🇸🇳🇮🇺🇸🙏🙏🙏