Sundance over at CTH is fond of quoting that once you have seen the marionette strings, you cannot unsee them. Mike Turner, a Republican congressman from Ohio, took the place of Devin Nunes as the ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) when Nunes left Congress.
On Sunday, Turner was interviewed on CBS by Ed O’Keefe about the illegal and unconstitutional raid on PDJT’s home at Mar-a-Lago. These men are two puppets who play their roles in trying to indict PDJT in the public’s mind. This is the only approach where the characters behind the curtain have any hope of being successful.
ED O’KEEFE: Welcome back to FACE THE NATION. I’m Ed O’Keefe in this morning for Margaret Brennan. We turn now to the FBI search at former President Trump’s Florida resort. Ohio Congressman Mike Turner is the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and he joins us this morning from Dayton, Ohio. Congressman, great to have you with us. Thank you for being here. This past week, a Florida federal judge asked the Justice Department to prepare a redacted version of the aff- of the affidavit that set off the FBI operation at the former president’s home, signaling he may be willing to release it as early as this coming week. But affidavits aren’t usually made public during an investigation so as to not impede the investigation. I’m curious what level of disclosure would satisfy the demand for the release of the affidavit, in your view?
REP. MIKE TURNER: Well, this is very revealing because the court has already made a ruling that they believe, and remember, the court knows what’s in the affidavit. The portions of the affidavit can be released to the public. Now, what’s important about this affidavit is it will give us the information to understand how did the FBI justify a raiding Mar-a-Lago and spending 9 hours in the president’s house when we know the former president’s home, they had other options besides just raiding the house. They could have gone in and asked for the subpoena to be enforced. And the mystery sort of here deepens, because we know Attorney General Garland himself has taken responsibility, said he approved it. And the American public want the attorney general focused on issues like human and drug smuggling at the border. They- Chinese espionage, out of control crime in our cities. But if it’s- if you’re going to turn to this, if you’re going to turn to the former president and Mar-a-Lago, they want to make certain that this is to the highest level, there’s an imminent national security threat. And this affidavit will tell us, did they even allege so? Because in their document, trying to keep the affidavit sealed, they didn’t even allege that there was a national security threat.
The first thing to note here is there is no discussion at all of the basis of the original subpoena. Was the original subpoena grounded in the law or was the subpoena some kind of fishing exhibition? There was only a cursory acknowledgement (by Turner) that such a subpoena existed and no acknowledgement at all that it had been dealt with back in June. Remember the DOJ had visited Mar-a-Lago and had asked that an additional padlock be put on the storage area where the documents were stored. That was done.
Does anyone in Congress/DOJ/FBI think that such a raid would have been approved for Obama’s home? Obama took 30 million documents with him. Trump took 15 boxes.
O’Keefe transitions into assuming that PDJT broke the law and took top secret information with him to Florida.
ED O’KEEFE: Well, I’m- I’m curious, since you’re a member of the Intelligence Committee, what use could a former president have for classified or top-secret information once he’s left office? Why- why bring it home with him to Florida?
Instead of expressing outrage at this assumption, instead of hitting back at the presumption of guilt of PDJT, the first thing Turner does is to agree with the premise put forward by O’Keefe (“…you have to ask him.”).
REP. TURNER: Well, I don’t know. I mean, you have to ask him. But certainly, we all know that every former president has access to their documents. It’s how they write their memoirs. They don’t have, you know, great recall of everything that’s occurred in their administration. And we don’t know that they were classified. We know, according to the FBI documents, that they were- they were identified as marked classified. You have, of course, the former president saying that he declassified them himself. But I think what’s important here about this abuse of discretion, we have evidence of the FBI abusing that discretion and of misconduct on behalf of the FBI. The FBI, you know, we had an attorney for the FBI that actually was convicted of doctoring an email to obtain a warrant against- against Trump. There’s Trump’s organization- you have the- the FBI using the Russia dossier, which has been proven to be debunked as evidence under a warrant that they submitted. Both- all of which CBS has reported, and I have them up on my website, your own stories of these abuses of discretion. And the other question that we have is- is just recently there was a raid on Project Veritas, which is a news organization, to supposedly retrieve President Biden’s daughter’s diary. Now, that’s not certainly an imminent national security threat. It might be embarrassing to the president, but it’s not something you’d see them do for an ordinary citizens. There are real questions as to what is the FBI doing here? It’s the- it’s you know, the rank and file FBI agents, everybody agrees, you know, we support them. We have great faith in them. But the leadership of the FBI, when they undertake a raid against the current president’s political rival, you have to ask these questions.
This exchange begs the question that if a significant national security issue existed, why wasn’t the Gang of Eight (Turner is a member) notified? Or do they only do that if a Democrat is involved? The Gang of Eight supposedly exists to weigh in on issues like this. It also highlights that Turner is either an idiot or someone dancing at the end of the marionette strings.
I thought I was going to puke when Turner took on the obligatory the FBI-rank-and-file-is-good role. “We just have to see if there was an abuse of discretion at the top.” This is almost as bad as Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) counseling that we should wait to see how this all plays out.
As one commenter noted:
Who investigates/creates crimes?
Who uses the courts for headlines?
Who raids lawyers offices?
Who raids a former PRESIDENT?
Who hides/erases phones, laptops and servers?
Where’s the awan laptop?
Where’s the carlos danger laptop?
Where’s hunters laptop?
Where’s those 33,000 Hillary emails?
Remember Epstein?
Larry nassir victims?
Gov wittless kidnapping?
Jan 6th set up?
No, the FBI is not and we should not. The warrant itself lacks the particularity, the specificity that is supposed to exist under our system of laws. As an attorney, Turner must know this. This exercise was obviously a fishing expedition to see what documents could be uncovered and made to embarrass the former President if not pursue some (I cannot resist this) “trumped up” charges. Let’s remember that the DOJ and the FBI have been weaponized against the Democrats’ political opponents for a long time.
Turner is the epitome of a Republican inside the inner circle in Washington. Turner should have expressed outrage like Lindsey Graham did during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Instead of expressing anger at this practice of the FBI and the DOJ being used to target political opponents, Turner falls back a bromide that he thinks will appeal to the average American. I do not think he is paying attention. The silent majority is no longer sleeping.
A thorough house cleaning is required across many committees. MAGA Newbies with senior executive and corporate board oversight experience or at least small business ownership might be helpful to run the government. But what is also needed is being able to say no to lobbyists, and sex orgy and drug-fest inviters (see Madison Cawthorne’s comments).
“Turner pledges to reverse the current committee use by Adam Schiff, vows not weaponize the committee for political purposes…”. How about pledging to investigate the DOJ and FBI for their roles in compromising national security with witch hunts like this? How about investigating the Chinese connections to the HPSCI? Some might characterize this approach as “slash and burn” but without such an approach, we will lose our country. The evil that inhabits DC must be put on notice.
The RNC & DNC are PRIVATE corporations, unaccountable to citizens yet they dictate who we get to vote for. The reality is Republicans are the right wing of the UniParty, and if we continue playing the GOP game, they will destroy us along with the country. The current GOP cannot be allowed to survive. It must be destroyed so that a true opposition party can rise. People like Turner in DC are the enemy, and we need to stop pretending otherwise.
PDJT is showing us the way. The way to destroy them is to wipe out so many seats that they can’t function, and you do that by wiping out “safe” districts that do not have Certified MAGA representatives. Elect people who love America and are not afraid to say so. We’re going to have to start cutting down to the bone. Change the composition of those who inhabit Washington.
As Ben Cipher noted:
We’re at the point where, if things aren’t stripped down to the studs and rebuilt, we’ve lost the republic.
There are ways and means to build a federal representative democratic republic with technology that didn’t exist in 1787. This technology, employed properly, could greatly help to minimize corruption through carefully designed checks and balances, just as our founders did, but going even further due to the nature of modern technology and instant communication.
A proper renewal of America could get her on course to go another 250 years. That’s what I’m here for. No band-aids, no pothole filling. There is a risk, certainly, that the elites will end up with greater control at the end of the process. But that risk exists if we do nothing. So, we cannot do nothing. We must try to save America.