By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 09, 2022
The FBI’s serving a search warrant on Donald Trump’s
residence is not — in spite of everything being said about it — unprecedented.
The FBI serves search warrants on homes all the time. Donald Trump is a former
president, not a mystical sacrosanct being.
If we really believe, as we say we believe, that this is
a republic, that nobody is above the law, that the presidency is just a
temporary executive-branch office rather than a quasi-royal entitlement, then
there is nothing all that remarkable about the FBI serving a warrant on a house
in Florida. I myself do not find it especially difficult to believe that there
exists reasonable cause for such a warrant. And if the feds have got it wrong,
that wouldn’t be the first time. Those so-called conservatives who are publicly
fantasizing about an FBI purge under the next Republican administration are
engaged in a particularly stupid form of irresponsibility.
There are no fewer than five different congressional
committees with FBI oversight powers. I’m not especially inclined to take
federal agencies and their officers at their word in almost any circumstance,
and so active and vigorous oversight seems to me appropriate here, as in most
other cases. But if it turns out, in the least surprising political development
of the decade, that Donald Trump is a criminal, then he should be treated like
any other criminal.
If that did indeed establish a precedent, it would be a
good precedent.
No comments:
Post a Comment