Republicans close ranks with Donald Trump and accuse the FBI of politicization

What have federal agents found in Donald Trump's mansion?

That question remains unanswered.

While the FBI, the Justice Department and the White House remain silent on the Mar-a-Lago search, Republicans have come out in a rush to present the operation as an illegitimate political maneuver to harm the former president.

The record raises the temperature of the pressure cooker of US politics, in which it has been a bombshell whose shock wave will reach the legislative elections in three months and, most likely, the presidential elections of 2024.

Trump already seemed more than ready to enter the presidential race, but those closest to the former president believe that the search of his house does not weaken but strengthens his will to go to the polls, even if it is to vindicate himself.

Trump has chosen to present himself as a martyr victim of political persecution and a "coordinated attack by the radical left" and prosecutors, as he described it on his social network on Tuesday.

The Republicans, especially the most radical ones, had already embraced the discourse of the instrumentalization of justice as a weapon and some, starting with Trump himself, spoke of a "Soviet" system.

After the registration, the speech has been extreme and generalized.

Numerous Republican governors have endorsed the former president's message, including Florida's Ron De Santis, who sounds like an alternative to Trump for the 2024 presidential election: "The registration of MAL [Mar-a-Lago] is another escalation in the use of federal agencies as weapons against the political opponents of the Regime, while people like Hunter Biden are treated with kid gloves”, he tweeted, to conclude: “Banana Republic”.

"This is the next level of Nixonism," Texas Governor Gregg Abbott has said.

“Never before has the country seen an administration go to such lengths to use the resources of the government to attack a former president and political rival.

This turns power into a weapon to crush dissent.

Such abuses must have limits”, he added.

The Governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, has spoken in the same vein: “The FBI raid on President Trump's house is an unprecedented use of the Department of Justice as a political weapon.

They have persecuted President Trump as a candidate, as president, and now as a former president.

Using the criminal justice system in this way is un-American.”

Or Virginia's Glenn Youngkin: "Selective and politically motivated actions have no place in our democracy."

The list is endless.

Even Mike Pence, who was vice president under Trump, but has been at odds with him since Joe Biden's victory certification session on January 6, 2021, has joined in: "Yesterday's action undermines public confidence in our system and Attorney General Garland must give a full explanation to the American people why this action was taken and must do so immediately."

Harriet Hageman, favorite to win in Wyoming's Republican primary next week, with which she would take the seat in the House of Representatives from Liz Cheney, Trump's fiercest critic within her party, has seen the opportunity to mark the ground denouncing “political persecution”: “If the FBI can treat a former president this way, imagine what they can do to the rest of us.

It is a justice system with double standards: one for the elites and one for their political enemies.”

If something was missing to load the inks, Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry denounced yesterday that three FBI agents went to see him while he was traveling with his family and seized his mobile phone.

"I am outraged -- though not surprised -- that the FBI, under the direction of Merrick Garland's Department of Justice, would seize the phone of a serving member of Congress."

That further inflamed the spirits of some of his co-religionists.

Third world country, politicization of the FBI, use of justice as a political weapon, persecution of opponents were repeated throughout the Republican spectrum, always without providing any evidence and without knowing the details of the proceedings.

On the Democratic side, prudence prevails and, at times, doubts about whether the operation can be turned against: “The Department of Justice must immediately explain the reason for its raid and it must be something more than a search for inconsequential files or it will be viewed as a political tactic and will undermine any future credible investigation and the legitimacy of the January 6 investigations,” former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote.

uncertain scenarios

The scenarios that are opening up are multiple and uncertain, and their development depends to a great extent on the evolution of the investigations and judicial cases in which Trump is immersed, starting with the one related to the handling of presidential documents.

That Trump had taken documents to Mar-a-Lago had been known for months, that some of them were marked confidential and others were damaged, too.

The National Archives themselves had told it in an extensive statement.

Does that allow processing of him?

There is no precedent, but it would be defensible with the letter of the law, which contemplates two different crimes related to the handling of documents, with which Trump was never careful.

Does it justify searching the house of a former president?

It depends on what additional evidence the FBI had that it was necessary to do so.

Those responsible for the Archives suspected that Trump had not delivered all the documents and transferred it to the Department of Justice, which has maintained an investigation and a tug-of-war with Trump for months that had gone almost unnoticed until Monday's record.

In practice, the judgment on the adequacy of the action will depend on what the agents have found.

If they have not obtained evidence with the entry into Mar-a-Lago, it will be very difficult to defend that the search, of which the White House claims to have received no prior notice, made sense.

Most observers and commentators believe that the Justice Department and the FBI could not have taken such a step lightly, and that a judge would not have authorized a search of the Trump mansion without hard evidence, but in the absence of explanations, the Republican response has occupied the ground.

The short-term electoral impact is also not evident.

Trump may be tempted to advance the announcement that he will run for the 2024 presidential elections, but that could turn the November legislative elections, which the Republicans almost took for granted despite Biden's recent good run, into a referendum on the former president, something that does not like anything in his party because it can galvanize and mobilize Democratic voters.

But even if he doesn't make that announcement, Trump is going to be much more present in the minds of voters than he already was, which was no small thing.

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