Time.news — There are two ways to view the search of the private residence of former United States President Donald Trump in Mar a Lago (Florida). The first would be that no one is beyond the reach of the arm of justice. It would be dignifying reading for the functioning of American justice, paragon of the free world. In a way, it would be a lesson in democracy for the world: the greats of this world are not immune to any procedure, not even the most humiliating, such as the public desecration of their private residence. The second, more worrying, would be if it turns out that this procedure is the fruit of the particular case made to a character, always very popular, irreverent, reviled by the media and, incidentally, candidate for the next elections. In this case, this measure would be interpreted as vexation, the result of political persecution of a State whose institutions are in the process of accelerated corruption. This would be a very bad signal for the normalization of arbitrariness, immediately taken over by the satrapies of the world. If the benchmark of democracy devalues, the rest follows.
The latest chapter in this American drama, which begins with the search of Donald Trump’s home on August 8, is the publication last Friday of the affidavit of the United States Department of Justice (Doj for its acronyms in English). This document is in the style of the “ Out of nowhere “. He seems to have to respond to the perplexity of the public, faced with an unprecedented measure. Usually, at least since the administration of Barack Obama, in the face of controversy, the practice in terms of public relations consists of filtering chosen towards the complacent press, that is to say almost all of the mainstream press, which by breaking down information on demand, self-proclaims from the register of investigative journalism.
But this time, the string was too big. A filtration would have signed the crime. Amid the ever-renewed scandal of corruption revelations from the Biden clan and the Hunter son, a leak would have turned eyes to Joe Biden, himself. A rather curious affidavit thus appeared. It is the Department of Justice which assumes the protagonism. Admittedly, entire paragraphs are censored, raising the idea that there is sensitive information to hide. Real state secrets, where there is probably nothing. But the objective is broader. It is a question of restoring a semblance of the rule of law and erasing this diffuse feeling of a banana republic.
Crédits : MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP
In this document, ” Search and size (search and seizure), the Department of Justice asserts conduct an investigation into the movement of classified information to unauthorized areas “. The investigation began, according to the affidavit in its second paragraph, ” following a report from the United States National Archives (or Nara in its acronym version), sent to the Department of Justice, on February 9, 2022, in accordance with the Presidential Record Act ».
The documents of the discord are contained in “ 15 boxes in which would be articles, photos, various impressions, notes, presidential correspondence, presidential and post-presidential archives and many classified archives “. The suspicion of violation of private correspondence would be imposed according to the canons of the rule of law, if the litigant was not an ex-president. On the strategic content of information, by definition any presidential document is automatically assimilated to a state secret, but so far none of the leaks to the mass media have demonstrated a threat to national security.
The document published on Friday was becoming urgent, precisely in the absence of evidence, to date, of a concrete threat to national security such as to justify such spectacular action. At the time of the search, it was claimed that Trump kept information about the nuclear program. The charges have since changed several times. When the threat was no longer nuclear, the FBI was targeting evidence of its involvement in the unrest in Congress on January 6, 2021, for which the ex-president continues to be investigated. The insinuation of espionage has even been brought up to date.
Three weeks later, the overall impression left by the search is that of an opportunistic procedure of pulling a net and seeing what can be caught. Which in law, in the United States as in all democracies, constitutes a flagrant violation of constitutional guarantees and could very quickly turn against the promoters of the approach.
Especially since this search exposed the politicization of the highest federal judicial body, the FBI. And, at the same time, recalled the inaction of the office in the face of the Hillary Clinton e-mail affair in 2016. 100 letters carrying classified information, 65 impacted with the seal of ” secret », 22 « Top secret », 2 093 « confidential “, tens of thousands of other mail carrying content on state affairs, all transferred to her personal server, without authorization, while she was Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. At the time, Bill Clinton’s wife benefited from the incredible complacency of then-FBI Director James B. Comey. The same one who today demolished Donald Trump on channels such as CNN, the president who removed him from office in 2017, precisely because of the Hillary Clinton email affair.
The other big case of violation of confidentiality rules at the highest level of the State concerns the emails of Hunter Biden. Business that comes back as a boomerang. What the content of these emails reveals is not just about state secrets, but about criminal cases directly involving the Biden clan for almost a decade. Unlike the judicial publicity granted to Donald Trump, in the case of Biden, social networks had been invited to block accounts that mentioned this case. That’s what Mark Zuckerberg revealed this week in an interview with Joe Rogan’s podcast. He would have, according to his own words, received a visit from the FBI, inviting him to censor any rebroadcast of Hunter Biden’s emails, as being ” Russian disinformation “. That is to say, in 2020, the FBI not only did not investigate the monumentality of the revelations bearing on cases of treason and corruption without appeal of the Biden family and coming directly from Hunter’s computer, but on the contrary, pressured social networks to suppress this information.
The search of Donald Trump’s home is another episode in the low-intensity democracy that is rapidly taking hold in the West. Justice, for it to be justice, must be articulated like science on the basis of doubt, causation, experience and proof. It is not abnormal, in the context of systemic corruption, that if one becomes politicized, the other follows.