FBI raids criminal's home

Jonathan Chait in New York magazine:

....The reason Donald Trump is the first former president to be treated like a criminal is that he is the first former president who is a criminal.

We don’t know what evidence the FBI may have obtained when it searched for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Not even Trump’s most delusional acolytes doubt he repeatedly and flagrantly violated the Presidential Records Act by bringing boxes of White House material to Florida. It’s entirely possible this will be the only offense that is uncovered by the raid.

The Republican view of this has always been that record-keeping protocols by high-ranking members of the executive branch are matters of the utmost seriousness and that violations of it ought to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. 

National Review treated the FBI’s preelection announcement of an investigation into Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information with her emails, not as a case of FBI abuse but as a devastating indictment of Clinton, and it was still publishing stories two years later insisting she ought to have been criminally charged....

See also Merrick Garland Has No Choice Now But to Go Big on the Trump Probe. I disagree with the premise in that hed. Garland should go only where the facts and the law lead him, in spite of how Republicans defamed Hillary for her minor email transgression.

Protecting a president

Rob Rogers