Last week, righty social media erupted over a highlight from a court filing from one of Donald Trump’s lawyers that was initially presented as proof the Biden administration “authorized” the use of deadly force in its raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in the classified documents case. From the Washington Examiner:
“WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE,” Trumpsaid. “NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!”
In a court filing from Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche, he outlined the order to raid Trump’s compound.
“The Order contained a ‘Policy Statement’ regarding ‘Use Of Deadly Force,’ which stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary,” he wrote. “The agents planned to bring ‘Standard Issue Weapon[s],’ ‘Ammo,’ ‘Handcuffs,’ and ‘medium and large sized bolt cutters,’ but they were instructed to wear ‘unmarked polo or collared shirts’ and to keep ‘law enforcement equipment concealed.'”
The FBI said in a statement provided to theWashington Examinerthat it included a “standard policy statement” in the search warrant documents of Trump’s residence.
As mere moments of common-sense analysis and reviewing the actual document at issue should have more than sufficed to establish, the story was crap. The policy statement included in the MAL operation order was not an “authorization” of deadly force—as if law enforcement decides whether or not to let investigators shoot back when people shoot at them on a case-by-case basis—but a reminder of the circ*mstances in which deadly force can ever be used—“only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”
The statement goes on to clarify that deadly force and/or gunfire may not be used to prevent escape, to disable vehicles, for warning shots, or against those threatening only themselves or property. It also requires officers to prevent other officers from using “excessive or unlawful force” if necessary. Taken as a whole, it’s utterly banal, CYA reading, the absence of which would surely have become a scandal if something went sideways in a raid where agents hadn’t had the rules spelled out to them beforehand.
But there’s another, even simpler reason why this couldn’t possibly have been part of some plot to get Trump killed: because Trump wasn’t anywhere near Mar-a-Lago that day. He wasn’t even in Florida. He was in New York. Magic bullet talk figures prominently in JFK Truther mythology; is the idea that a teleporting bullet would have been fired from MAL?
Alas, under the new ethos of the Conservative Media Complex, truth means nothing there’s an opportunity to coax monetizable clicks from the gullible—especially when that opportunity revolves around assassination mongering, which is great for reinforcing fantasies that the object of one’s fanboyism is so unfathomably dangerous to the forces of evil that they’ll pull out all the stops to destroy him:
Serial liar Julie Kelly called the scoop “mind-blowing” and accused the FBI of “risk[ing] the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests.”
Gleeful demagogue Sean Davis spun the “real reason” for the raid into “an excuse to use deadly force against Donald Trump,” strawmanned corrections as saying “they’re allowed to kill any of the targets they raid,” and otherwise lied about what non-grifter conservatives were actually saying about the story.
Thin-skinned thug Dan Bongino pulled a similar bait-and-switch between calling the deadly force policy standard and the MAL search itself standard.
Mollie Hemingway, living proof that my alma mater Hillsdale College’s journalism program is a sham, repeated the bogus narrative that DOJ “authorized use of deadly force against him” (Trump, emphasis added), then dishonestly caricatured the response to the claim as “It is standard policy to authorize shooting our Republican political opponent.”
Noted brain donor and all-around stain on the halls of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene went so far as to declare, “Merrick Garland issued a kill order for President Trump.”
On Tuesday, however, the narrative got a refreshing dose of reality from an unexpected source: Blaze reporter Steve Baker (who is currently being hounded by the Justice Department on bogus January 6 charges). In a lengthy Twitter thread, Baker explained in detail why the deadly force issue was a nothingburger, including quoting directly from the operation documents:
It is EXCEPTIONALLY CLEAR that both DOJ and FBI were working in coordination with Secret Service representatives at MAL. This WAS NOT a “surprise raid” that could have led to a “blood bath.” Further, the “POLICY STATEMENT USE OF DEADLY FORCE” in Form SD-888 is ALWAYS there. In FACT, it is the only PRE-PRINTED section on the SD-888, and this has been the case for many years [...]
Once the judge signs a warrant -- legitimate or not, illegal or not -- a series of standard protocols and operational procedures are put into place. Those include filling out form FD-888, which is mostly a blank document - EXCEPT for the USE of FORCE statement. Every FD-888 requires that under the “HANDLING OF INJURED” section, the nearest hospital, trauma unit, and life flight info be filled out. This “revelation” was another of last week’s posts used to fan the rage storm. As if this was unique to the MAL warrant. (It wasn’t.)
Being fundamentally dishonorable people, nobody listed in the above paragraphs retracted or apologized for their initial misrepresentations in light of Baker’s analysis. Davis, Hemingway, and Greene didn’t discuss the story at all Tuesday. Bongino passive-aggressively retweeted a swipe at unspecified “morons doubl[ing] down on stupid.” The only one to take Baker head-on was Kelly, who naturally did it in the most Julie Kelly way possible: frothingly unhinged.
She alternated between huffing that she doesn’t “need to be told what to be outraged about” (arguably true; it’s an open question how much of her outrage is genuine as opposed to purely performative), fixating on how agents were dressed as if it matters, quibbling over whether posting selective excerpts from documents constitutes “editing,” and desperately trying to keep the original narrative alive by asking over and over again what might have happened if Trump had shown up—the answer to which, by the way, is “nothing,” because obviously Secret Service agents traveling with a president are going to communicate with Secret Service agents already at his destination, who in turn would relay said president’s arrival to investigators.
Once again, the issue here is not that unscrupulous acolytes for a bad politician are pushing a fake story. It’s not even that they claim to be on “our” side, at least not directly. It’s that there are no longer any penalties for doing it on “our side,” because “our side” doesn’t care. And therein lies the problem for conservatives: under MAGA, the conservative infotainment complex isn’t our side anymore.
