Octopus Overlords

pr0ner wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 2:44 pm The relevant USC sections for the search warrant:

Grifman wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 3:54 pm

Skinypupy wrote: Fri Aug 12, 2022 9:42 pm He’s now claiming that he had a “standing order” that any documents he took home were immediately declassified by default.

I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works

Grifman wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 3:17 am Who is giving Trump legal advice? Isn’t he well past the point a defense lawyer would tell him to STFU? I mean, he’s basically confessed to a crime at this point.

malchior wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 6:47 am It's intentionally incoherent. Did they plant it or was it there but "declassified" by his magic standing order? It's all a farce but that's the point. They tell us obvious lies and nothing happens. They are showing us that they can get away with anything and they're effectively in charge. It's classic fascism. People have to wake the fuck up. It's happening.

“This is one of the two feds who signed the ‘Receipt for Property’ form, which detailed—at a very high level—the fishing expedition that the FBI performed at Mar-a-Lago,” Ziegler said on both Truth Social and Telegram.

The former Trump administration staffer further listed out the FBI agents’ date of birth, work emails and linked to alleged family members’ social media accounts.

“Hope he doesn’t get a good night’s sleep for the rest of 2022,” Ziegler wrote on Truth Social, responding to another Truth Social user’s photos of one of the alleged FBI officials who signed off on the inventory receipts on the warrant.

...

Speaking on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, Ziegler doubled down on his posting of information he claims to be that of the agents.

“We have to have faces,” he said. “There are people ruining America, and they have names, and emails, and addresses.”

Multiple attempts to reach Ziegler for comment were unsuccessful on Friday night.

The targeting by a former Trump administration aide follows CNN reporting that the FBI now faces “unprecedented” newfound threats against their agency.

“We work closely with our law enforcement partners to assess and respond to such threats, which are reprehensible and dangerous,” the FBI told CNN in a statement. “As always, we would like to remind members of the public that if they observe anything suspicious to report it to law enforcement immediately.”

At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said.

The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.

The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the search warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday, an extraordinary step that generated political shock waves.

...

Shortly before Mr. Garland made the announcement, a person close to Mr. Trump reached out to a Justice Department official to pass along a message from the former president to the attorney general. Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Garland to know he had been checking in with people around the country and found them to be enraged by the search.

“The country is on fire,” Mr. Trump said, according to a person familiar with the exchange. “What can I do to reduce the heat?”

$iljanus wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:24 am

malchior wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 6:47 am It's intentionally incoherent. Did they plant it or was it there but "declassified" by his magic standing order? It's all a farce but that's the point. They tell us obvious lies and nothing happens. They are showing us that they can get away with anything and they're effectively in charge. It's classic fascism. People have to wake the fuck up. It's happening.

The shifting goal posts are almost comical. Oh he declassified them. Oh the FBI planted them. Unfortunately there's a sizable number of people who won't believe any facts that come out from this.

Holman wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 4:54 pm It's being reported today that lists of spies on the American payroll were included among the documents.

I'm sure that was just light reading that appealed to an intellectually curious man like Trump.

In pursuing the unprecedented search of Donald Trump's residence on Monday, the FBI was seeking to retrieve Top Secret and "compartmented" documents dealing with intelligence "sources and methods," two federal government sources tell Newsweek—documents with the potential to reveal U.S. intelligence sources, including human sources on the American government payroll.

What does that mean with respect to the Espionage Act? It means that the law should simply be repealed and that Americans need to start demanding repeal rather than simply pleading with the Justice Department to enforce it in a more judicious manner.

Let’s keep in mind that the law is the fruit of a rotten foreign intervention. Hardly anyone defends the U.S. intervention into World War I. That war was, quite simply, none of the U.S. government’s business. President Wilson, however, was hell-bent on embroiling the U.S. in the conflict. Wilson believed that if the force of the U.S. government could be used to totally defeat Germany, this would be the war to finally end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy.

Wilson’s mindset, of course, was lunacy. Sure enough, the U.S. intervention resulted in Germany’s total defeat, which was then followed by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles, which Adolf Hitler would use to justify his rise to power. Nazism and World War II soon followed. So much for the war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy. Tens of thousands of American men were sacrificed for nothing.

In response to the FBI search of former President Donald Trump's home in Florida on Monday, Trump and his allies in Congress and right-wing media have returned to his preferred strategy for communicating in a crisis: say a whole bunch of nonsense in rapid succession.

From his battles against impeachment to his effort to limit the political fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has attempted to flood the zone with such a quantity and variety of lies, conspiracy theories and distractions that Americans will tune out, turn away or cease to know what is true and not. And he has regularly been joined by a large cast of eager defenders.