by Ned Barnett
The recent Mar-a-Lago raid will go down in history as one of the more egregious violations of any individual’s constitutional protections. Objective future historians will view this as an outrageous abuse of the tradition that former presidents be treated with the decorum due their office. This document seizure, conducted under false pretenses, is unprecedented.
Only two other presidents have ever faced impeachment: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Both were believed by the then-majority party in the House to have committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Yet neither of these men was convicted, nor afterward subject to inappropriate searches and seizures.
This is why this absurd violation of Trump is unprecedented — a word meaning “it’s never happened before.” The U.S. attorney general (A.G.), the FBI, and the federal Judiciary have all done themselves and our country irreversible harm. Absent a Supreme Court ruling, legal precedents like this, once established, have a nasty way of remaining precedents.
In the future, any A.G., with the complicity of the FBI and just one federal judge, will be permitted to do the same thing to anyone, all in the name of whatever faux reason they can “trump up.”…
