Mar-a-Largo raided by FBI?

[Jarhyn]

I expect my CHILDREN to call me mother, NOT my husband. Ick.

I doubt that your opinion, or that of Jarhyn, are of much consequence to Pence, his family, or the Teapartiers in general.

But this is kind of a strange derailment over a tiny bit of cultural norms.
I don't recall ever hearing Pence use the term. But I probably have and just didn't notice because it just didn't matter.
Tom

This comes back full circle then to the OP: people doing shit that you probably didn't notice because nobody (except the people who are well educated in why it matters) thought it mattered.

Some people hear a "tiny" violation of cultural norms and others hear a "major overstep of personal boundaries, committed by someone whose legislation attacks those who have learned often at great pains how to navigate respect of personal boundaries".

Some people see "tiny (handed)" violations of cultural norms and others see "a major threat to global nuclear superpower stability".

A lot of people don't pay attention to important details.

When people DO pay attention to important details, they can ascertain such things as "there's a navy coming to attack us" from tiny "insignificant" details.

Pence is on the shallow end of the pool with a hypocritically kinky relationship amidst biased indifference to LGBT plight mostly on the basis that their sexuality seems uncomfortable!

 

[TomC]

Pence is on the shallow end of the pool with a hypocritically kinky relationship

This particular lie about Pence tells me more about you than anything else.

There's plenty to criticize about Pence's politics. Making up stuff like this makes you look icky to me.
Tom

 

[starwater]

Trump can't find credible legal representation

The result is an almost comical dynamic: As the Post summarized, a former American president is currently represented by a legal defense team that includes a Florida insurance lawyer who’s never had a federal case, a past general counsel for a parking-garage company, and a former host from a propagandistic cable outlet.

No credible lawyer wants to represent the orange one. He also has a nasty reputation of not paying his bills. Its all coming around to bite him in the ass. As the saying goes - what goes around comes around.

 

[Jarhyn]

Pence is on the shallow end of the pool with a hypocritically kinky relationship

This particular lie about Pence tells me more about you than anything else.

There's plenty to criticize about Pence's politics. Making up stuff like this makes you look icky to me.
Tom

I'm sure we can all find things to find icky about one another. I've just seen enough relationships with a sexual power dynamic to be able to identify one fairly reliably, and which indicates keeping the details of such private within the community of people who actively consent to know and talk about it, while lending support to that private community. There's nothing wrong with open secrets, except those who treat them as fully public or unacceptable at all (except when they actually break the well-explored and accepted bounds of consent, again a hard-won knowledge!)

Pence's position on porn seems just so ridiculously hypocritical given that their life so obviously involves public sex play.

 

[TomC]

Pence is on the shallow end of the pool with a hypocritically kinky relationship

This particular lie about Pence tells me more about you than anything else.

There's plenty to criticize about Pence's politics. Making up stuff like this makes you look icky to me.
Tom

I'm sure we can all find things to find icky about one another. I've just seen enough relationships with a sexual power dynamic to be able to identify one fairly reliably, and which indicates keeping the details of such private within the community of people who actively consent to know and talk about it, while lending support to that private community. There's nothing wrong with open secrets, except those who treat them as fully public or unacceptable at all (except when they actually break the well-explored and accepted bounds of consent, again a hard-won knowledge!)

Pence's position on porn seems just so ridiculously hypocritical given that their life so obviously involves public sex play.

Dang.
You're just going keep doubling down on this crap aren't you?

Maybe the staff should split off the derailment to Elsewhere.
Tom

 

[ZiprHead]

I don't care about Pence's mommy issues.

Surely someone had to have signed for those documents to be released. Who did that?

 

[Copernicus]

There are some people who argue about whether to call this incident a raid, but I checked some dictionaries, and "raid" fits what it is. Especially "police raid".

Lawfully executed raid?

"Hello...Secret Service detail? It's the FBI. We have a warrant."

"Hello FBI. This is the Secret Service. Can you show us the warrant?"

FBI: (presents warrant, detailing the places they need to search, and what they are authorized to take)

Secret Service: "Okay, this all seems in order. Come on in. Hey...how 'bout this weather we're having, huh?"

No guns drawn. No doors busted down. No footage that would wind up on an episode of "Fed Cops" on cable, with a shirtless Trump being hauled out of the property and cuffed. Just polite conversations across federal law enforcement agencies.


To hear Trump tell it, they busted down the door and went straight to sniffing Melania's panties and violating the "sanctity" of his golf resort.

That's exactly the point of using the term "raid"--to build a narrative that a legally justified search warrant was some kind of violent overreach by federal storm troopers. It worked in the minds of Trump supporters. They could perfectly well imagine a wild rush into the house by lot of gun-toting, shouting officers in bulletproof vests. They've seen it all on TV and in the movies before. They even "broke into" his safe by asking someone to open it. Why didn't they just ask for the materials? They did? Well, that's Donald Trump. A great former president. Sometimes you need to keep asking and be very, very patient. He has his pride.

Trump watched the search on his house CC and knew perfectly well that it was orderly. It was a raid mainly in the sense that it came as a surprise. Trump underestimated Garland and was shocked by the audacity. Ultimately, some of the content of the boxes might have needed to be destroyed to prevent it from being used against him, and the fear was that he was in the process of doing that. Nobody can be sure that they even got all of the government property that he was hiding.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

@TomC if there was something less creepy about it, Pence would actually discuss why he calls her "mother", especially in light of the fact he gets mocked over it.

Does it have something to do with diaper fetishes?

Asking for my cat.

 

[lpetrich]

Trump is giving the FBI the January 6 treatment | Salon.com - "Trump's implicit threats and attempts to intimidate Merrick Garland into backing down are becoming less subtle"

Donald Trump has expressed many emotions about his actions inciting an insurrection on the Capitol on January 6, but as witnesses, both public and private, can attest, not a single one of them was remorse. Mostly, he appears to feel pride in the power he has over his followers. His former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, described Trump on the day of the riot as "gleefully watching on his TV as he often did, 'look at all of the people fighting for me,' hitting rewind, watching it again." ...

Since then, Trump has toggled between feigned disapproval and open gloating about January 6 ...

Because of this, no one should be surprised that Trump is now reacting to a man attacking the FBI offices in Cincinnati by doubling down on his inciting rhetoric. After FBI agents searched Trump's Palm Beach resort, Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents, Trump has been using every avenue possible to send a message to the Department of Justice: Stop the investigation or my supporters could become even more dangerous.

Noting
Trump Lawyer Told Justice Dept. That Classified Material Had Been Returned - The New York Times - to the government

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 that he had been checking in with people around the country and found them to be enraged by the search.

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

Back to Amanda Marcotte's article.

The message is disguised as helpful, but it's obviously meant to be threatening. It's a variation on the cliched mobster threat: "Nice place you've got there. Shame if something happened to it." Both Trump and the intended target understand that Trump is the one who lit the fire with his repeated claims of being "persecuted" and the flat-out lies he uses to bolster those claims. So his "question" is really more a form of blackmail. He's not actually offering assistance, so much as trying to remind Garland of his continued power over his followers.

The threatening nature of this rhetoric was underscored by Trump's game-playing with the warrant release. First, he pretended not to have the warrant and demanded that it be released, even though he did have a copy and could release it whenever he wished. Then his team released the warrant to Breitbart before the DOJ had a chance to release it. By doing so, Trump made sure the version of the warrant that spread most rapidly was one featuring the unredacted names of the individual FBI agents involved in the search, putting them and their families in danger.

So he doxxed those agents.

Then,

Monday morning, Trump made his veiled threats to Garland public, going to Fox News to engage in faux-handwringing over how the "country is in a very dangerous position," as if he weren't the person who made it that way.

"There is tremendous anger, like I've never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one—years of scams and witch hunts, and now this," he said. "If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that."

He's the one who caused it. It's like he killed his parents and he's begging for mercy because he's an orphan.

 

[lpetrich]

Trump, Alex Jones and Steve Bannon: GOP goons follow a familiar playbook when accountability knocks | Salon.com - "Threats and bluster are meant to intimidate authorities and juries into backing down — but no one should be afraid"

As former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney Ken White noted in a lengthy Twitter thread following the raid, the "feds do not seek search warrants lightly." As White explained, such warrants generally require "probable cause to believe that the specified location has the specified evidence of a specified federal crime." This one, in particular, would have been combed over by multiple high-ranking authorities, including Attorney General Merrick Garland himself. Crucially, while we the public do not know the details of what is almost certainly one of the most careful and detailed warrants imaginable, Trump himself does, because the subject of the search is given the warrant.

In the lengthy diatribe Trump released Monday night, he failed to mention any of these details.

Instead, he deflected about Watergate and Hillary Clinton, and called himself a victim of "political persecution".

Reading the statement, I was struck by how much Trump is using the exact same playbook currently in use by his buddy Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist founder of Infowars. And just like Jones did, Trump is using the legal case against him to fundraise.

...
Steve Bannon, another talk show host and Trump crony, used the same playbook recently. His lawyers barely bothered to defend him against charges of refusing a congressional subpoena related to the January 6 insurrection. Instead, the strategy was focused on this outside-the-court intimidation play.

...
Importantly, this outside game strategy — which is unsurprisingly being amplified and honed in real time by Fox News on Trump's behalf — should be understood as one of violence.

 

[lpetrich]

Trump puts a target on the FBI: Cincinnati gunman shows danger posed by an endless supply of dupes | Salon.com - "Ricky Shiffer didn't get arrested for his alleged part in the Capitol riot — but he'd still be alive if he had been"

But a major secondary reason is what happened on Thursday, when a deranged Trump supporter named Ricky Shiffer fired a nail gun at the FBI offices in Cincinnati, Ohio, before getting killed in an hours-long standoff with the police.

As reporters covering right-wing extremism swiftly documented, before much of it was taken down, Shiffer was all wound up by Trump's lies about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago Monday, lies that have been amplified and validated by right-wing media outlets like Fox News and much of the GOP establishment.

"Kill the FBI on sight, and be ready to take down other active enemies of the people," Shiffer apparently posted on Truth Social, a Trump-owned social media site, according to Andy Campbell of HuffPost.

"Well, I thought I had a way through bullet proof glass, and I didn't. If you don't hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I., and it'll mean either I was taken off the internet, the F.B.I. got me," Shiffer allegedly posted on Trump's site, right after the nail gun attack, according to NBC News.

 

[Angry Floof]

He thought a nail gun could penetrate bullet proof glass but not bullets?

 

[lpetrich]

He thought a nail gun could penetrate bullet proof glass but not bullets?

He ought to have experimented with a nailgun and some bulletproof glass.

 

[Angry Floof]

He thought a nail gun could penetrate bullet proof glass but not bullets?

He ought to have experimented with a nailgun and some bulletproof glass.

True. But right wing authoritarian followers don't do stuff like that. lol

 

[lpetrich]

"87,000 IRS agents": New conspiracy theory proves Trump's encouragement of violence is GOP standard | Salon.com - "The latest GOP lie isn't just a distraction — it's feeding the violent fantasies of the insurrectionist right"

So the conspiracy theory boils down to this: President Joe Biden is using the IRS as cover to build up a secret police force of 87,000 armed jackbooted thugs who are coming to kick down MAGA doors to take guns, etc. We've all heard it thousands of times before from the Infowars and far right social media set, which has predicted for decades that a Kristallnacht for NASCAR fans is coming any day now. This time, however, the conspiracy theory is being pumped up not just by the fever swamps but by GOP leadership and Fox News.

Less than a week after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced a surprise agreement to pass the bill, Tucker Carlson was hosting segments on Fox News falsely claiming that because a small minority of IRS enforcement agents have to carry guns, Biden is "treating the IRS as a military agency" and "stockpiling" ammunition.

None of this is true, to be clear. The hiring is mostly focused on pencil pushers, and even the increased enforcement is focused on the richest Americans.

...
"The Biden Admin has fully weaponized DOJ & FBI to target their political enemies. And with 87K new IRS agents, they're coming for YOU too," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., tweeted last Monday, always eager to be out there first with the most shameless Republican rhetoric.

"Who do you think they'll weaponize the 87,000 IRS agents against? The answer is obvious. Their political enemies," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., tweeted, always eager to beat Cruz in the race to the bottom.

...
It's doubly worrisome because a huge number of influential commentators are, in fact, arguing that the FBI should just let Trump get away with crimes, lest more of Trump's lunatic followers act out violently. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times argues, this is absurd because it amounts to allowing "an insurrectionists' veto" over any law they don't want to follow.

"The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn't get its way," Goldberg notes. "Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?"

No wonder the right wing howls about "Antifa" and portrays BLM as armed revolutionaries -- it's pure projection.

 

[TomC]

So he doxxed those agents.

That might be his undoing.

If there's anybody on the planet I wouldn't want gunning for me, it would be the calibre of FBI agents who took on this particular job.
Tom

 

[lpetrich]

Laura Ingraham is delusional to think GOP voters will grow tired of Trump. They love his crimes | Salon.com

"The country I think is so exhausted," Fox News host Laura Ingraham said Monday on a right-wing podcast. "They're exhausted by the battle, the constant battle, that they may believe that, well, maybe it's time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump's policies, who's not Trump."

Except that being raided gave Trump a poll boost.

 

[Patooka]

"They're exhausted by the battle, the constant battle, that they may believe that, well, maybe it's time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump's policies, who's not Trump."

Wait, Trump had policies? Can Q-tards even name one?

 

[atrib]

He thought a nail gun could penetrate bullet proof glass but not bullets?

He's a Trump supporter. How smart can he be?

 

[crazyfingers]

Wait, Trump had policies? Can Q-tards even name one?

His policies were to make things as bad as possible for anyone who isn't a white christian guy.