A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and  uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.

(graphic)

The report, published by The Heartland Institute, was compiled via satellite and in-person survey visits to NOAA weather stations that contribute to the “official” land temperature data in the United States. The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link), and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.

“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”

NOAA’s “Requirements and Standards for [National Weather Service] Climate Observations” instructs that temperature data instruments must be “over level terrain (earth or sod) typical of the area around the station and at least 100 feet from any extensive concrete or paved surface.” And that “all attempts will be made to avoid areas where rough terrain or air drainage are proven to result in non-representative temperature data.” This new report shows that instruction is regularly violated.

READ THE REPORT (PDF).

For more information, or to speak with the authors of this study please contact Vice President and Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org or call/text 312-731-9364.

This new report is a follow up to a March 2009 study, titled “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” which highlighted a subset of over 1,000 surveyed stations and found 89 percent of stations had heat-bias issues. In April and May 2022, The Heartland Institute’s team of researchers visited many of the same temperature stations as in 2009, plus many not visited before. The new survey sampled 128 NOAA stations, and found the problem of heat-bias has only gotten worse.

“The original 2009 surface stations project demonstrated conclusively that the federal government’s surface temperature monitoring system was broken, with the vast majority of stations not meeting NOAA’s own standards for trustworthiness and quality. Investigations by government watchdogs OIG and GAO confirmed the 2009 report findings,” said H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environment Policy at The Heartland Institute who surveyed NOAA surface stations himself this spring. “This new study is evidence of two things. First, the government is either inept or stubbornly refuses to learn from its mistakes for political reasons. Second, the government’s official temperature record can’t be trusted. It reflects a clear urban heat bias effect, not national temperature trends.”

An example of the bias problem

The chart below, found on page 17 of the report, shows 30 years of data from NOAA temperature stations in the Continental United States (CONUS). The blue lines show recorded temperatures and the trend from stations that comply with NOAA’s published standards. The yellow lines are temperatures taken from stations that are not compliant with those standards (i.e. near artificial hot spots). The red lines are the “official” adjusted temperature released by NOAA.

(graphic)

“If you look at the unperturbed stations that adhere to NOAA’s published standard – ones that are correctly located and free of localized urban heat biases – they display about half the rate of warming compared to perturbed stations that have such biases,” Watts said. “Yet, NOAA continues to use the data from their warm-biased century-old surface temperature networks to produce monthly and yearly reports to the U.S. public on the state of the climate.”

“The issue of localized heat-bias with these stations has been proven in a real-world experiment conducted by NOAA’s laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and published in a peer reviewed science journal.” Watts added.

“By contrast, NOAA operates a state-of-the-art surface temperature network called the U.S. Climate Reference Network,” Watts said. “It is free of localized heat biases by design, but the data it produces is never mentioned in monthly or yearly climate reports published by NOAA for public consumption.

1. How CO2 flows out of the atmosphere.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) correctly assumes the outflow of CO2 from the atmosphere is proportional to the CO2 level divided by a time constant.

This time constant – that the IPCC calls “turnover time” and we call “e-time” – describes how fast CO2 flows out of the atmosphere.

IPCC (2007, p. 948) defines “turnover time” equal to the first power of the carbon level divided by the outflow of carbon from the reservoir,

“Turnover time (T) is the ratio of the mass M of a reservoir (e.g., a gaseous compound in the atmosphere) and the total rate of removal S from the reservoir: T = M / S. For each removal process, separate turnover times can be defined.”

IPCC (2007, p. 948) says the turnover time (T) for natural CO2 is about four years.

“Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an extreme example. Its turnover time is only about four years because of the rapid exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean and terrestrial biota.”

IPCC’s data for its natural carbon cycle (IPCC, 2013, p. 470-471) show the e-time for atmospheric CO2 is 3.5 years, supporting IPCC’s statement of “about four years.”

Simple physics shows when outflow is proportional to the first power of level, natural and human carbon cycles are independent. So, we can calculate these carbon cycles independently and then add them up to get the total. We need only to calculate the human carbon cycle over time to see how human CO2 changes atmospheric CO2.

2.  The first approximation conflicts with IPCC claims.

IPCC’s data show the inflow of human CO2 into the atmosphere is about 5% of the total CO2 inflow and natural CO2 is about 95%.

Since human and natural CO2 molecules are identical, their e-times are identical. Therefore, to the first approximation, the composition of today’s atmospheric CO2 is about 5% human and 95% natural.

Yet, IPCC (2013, p. 467, Executive Summary) says,

“With a very high level of confidence, the increase in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and those arising from land use change are the dominant cause of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.”

IPCC (2013, pp. 470-471) assumes the natural CO2 level remained at 280 ppm after 1750 and, therefore, human CO2 caused all the CO2 increase since 1750. This would make human CO2 about 32% of 415 ppm as of 2020.

How can a 5% inflow cause 32% of the CO2 level?

It can’t. Even the IPCC realizes this problem. So, to support its claim that human CO2 causes dangerous climate change, the IPCC incorrectly claims human CO2 stays in the atmosphere longer than natural CO2.

IPCC (2013, p. 469) incorrectly claims:

“The removal of human-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes will take a few hundred thousand years (high confidence). … about 15 to 40% of emitted CO2 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years. This long time required … to remove anthropogenic CO2 makes climate change caused by elevated CO2 irreversible on human time scale.”

This IPCC claim violates IPCC’s own data-based e-time and ignores that human and natural CO2 molecules are identical, and therefore their e-times are identical.

3.  The second approximation proves the IPCC is wrong.

The first approximation considered only the atmosphere. The second approximation uses IPCC’s four-reservoir carbon cycle model. The physics model, using outflow proportional to level and IPCC’s e-times, replicates IPCC’s natural carbon cycle, shown in Figure 1.

Then, this same model calculates a human carbon cycle compatible with IPCC’s natural carbon cycle, using recursive, annual time steps from 1750 to 2020, shown Figure 2.

This compatible human carbon cycle shows human CO2 has added only 33 ppm (8%) while nature has added 100 ppm (92%) to IPCC’s 280 ppm level in 1750, as of 2020.

According to the scientific method, the physics model has proved IPCC’s claim – that human CO2 caused all the CO2 increase above 280 ppm – is false.

Good high-school students can learn how the physics model works.

4.  IPCC’s natural carbon cycle

Figure 1 shows IPCC’s natural carbon cycle at equilibrium with atmospheric CO2 at 280 ppm (589 PgC). The boxes show reservoirs and arrows the flows between reservoirs.

Figure 1. Levels and flows for IPCC’s (2013) natural carbon cycle.

Figure 1 shows 1.4% of natural carbon is in the atmosphere and 90% is in the deep ocean. This is an equilibrium fingerprint that human carbon will approach.

5.  Physics model applied to human carbon.

Figure 2 shows the physics carbon cycle model with IPCC’s four reservoirs and six outflows, where the arrows are all positive numbers.

Figure 2. The human carbon cycle model uses the same physics as IPCC’s
natural carbon cycle but adds the annual inflow of human carbon.

Human carbon has added only one percent to the total carbon in the natural carbon cycle.

Figure 3 shows how the reservoir levels change with time for human carbon.

The purple dashed line shows the cumulative human carbon since 1750. The solid bold line shows the measured atmospheric carbon level above 280 ppmv.

Data alone prove natural CO2 increased the CO2 level above 280 ppm. The cumulative “New Human carbon added” before 1955 is less than measured “atmospheric carbon,” making it impossible for human carbon to have caused all the CO2 increase.

Figure 3. How human carbon levels change with time.

The red dashed line shows human CO2 added to the atmosphere is much less than the “New Human carbon added” because the CO2 e-time of 3.5 years lets CO2 flow out of the atmosphere much faster than it can accumulate.

6.  The Bern model uses IPCC’s assumption.

Figure 4 compares the physics model with the Bern model.

Figure 4. Pulse decay by the physics model and the Bern model.

The key difference between the Bern model and the physics model is the Bern model uses IPCC’s invalid assumption that human CO2 causes all the CO2 increase while the physics model uses IPCC’s e-time of 3.5 years.

7.  Isotope data show CO2 increase is natural.

Figure 5 shows

• ¹⁴C data (black solid line) and its curve fit after 1970 (black dashed line).
• ¹⁴C data relative to the δ14C value in 1970 (blue sawtooth line) and its curve fit.
• ¹²CO2 data in ppmv (red sawtooth line).

δ¹⁴C is a measure of the ₁₄/ ¹²C ratio. The natural level of δ¹⁴C is zero.
Human CO₂ has no ¹⁴C, so its δ¹⁴C is -1000. If human CO₂ were 32% of the CO₂ in the
atmosphere, it would dilute the natural δ¹⁴C level from zero to -320.
Data show δ¹⁴C has returned to its natural level of zero even as ¹²C (red line) has increased, showing that natural CO₂ has dominated the increase in atmosphere CO₂.
The ¹⁴C curve fit shows ¹⁴CO₂ e-time is 10.0 years (Hardy and Salby, 2021; Berry, 2021).
The ¹²CO2 e-time is smaller than the ¹⁴CO₂ e-time because the atom is heavier than
the ¹²C atom. This confirms that the e-time for ¹²CO₂ is less than 10.0 years.

Figure 5. δ¹⁴C data (black line) and its curve fit (black dashed line),
relative (blue sawtooth line) and its curve fit (black dashed line), and ¹²CO2 ppmv (red line).

Conclusions

The simple physics model – using IPCC’s outflow proportional to level and e-times –proves natural CO2 controls atmospheric CO2. As of 2020, natural CO2 has added about 100 ppm, and human CO2 only 33 ppm, to IPCC’s CO2 level of 280 ppm in 1750.

References

Berry, E. X, 2021: The impact of human CO2 on atmospheric CO2. Science of Climate Change, December 14, 2021, The impact of human CO2 on atmospheric CO2 – SCC (klimarealistene.com); https://doi.org/10.53234/scc202112/212

Harde, H. and Salby, M. L., 2021: What Controls the Atmosphere CO2 Level? Science of Climate Change, August 2021. https://doi.org/10.53234/scc202111/28. https://scc.klimarealistene.com/produkt/what-controls-the-atmospheric-CO2- level/

IPCC, 2013: Ciais, P., Sabine, et al. 2013: Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles. The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Cambridge University Press, UK and New York, NY, USA.

IPCC. 2007: Climate Change 2007 – The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Annex 1: Glossary: Lifetime. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-annexes-1.pdf

As the indefatigable Eric Worrall reported here a couple of weeks back, the Forces of Darkness are becoming concerned at the lengthening of the New Pause. They are beginning to write the nervous little pieces that they wrote when the previous Great Pause began to become significant.

I well remember the first time I drew the attention of the U.S. House of Representatives to the fact that, at that time (in 2007 or thereby), as now, there had been no global warming for seven or eight years: in fact, there had been a small cooling. The news that there had been cooling during that period caused consternation among the “Democrats”.

Against me was Tom Karl, then in charge of the clattering train at NOAA. He was as consternated as his fellow “Democrats” at the news that there had been no global warming for so long a time. He furiously tried to undermine the result by saying that it had not been proper for me to average the temperature anomalies of four distinct global-temperature datasets, one of which was his own. I countered that it made no difference either way, since all four of the datasets I had used, including that of NOAA, had shown a global cooling for the previous seven or eight years.

Eventually Rep. Joe Barton (R: TX), then chairman of the Republican minority caucus on the House energy committee, intervened and ordered both sides to write to the committee justifying their stances. For me, that was easy: I sent individual graphs of the four datasets on which I had relied, including that of NOAA, which all showed cooling. Tom Karl was splutteringly furious, but the data are the data. “It is what it is,” as Roy Spencer puts it.

At the end of that Great Pause, in November 2015, Senator Cruz (R: TX) showed our HadCRUT4 graph to the Senate, again provoking fury from the “Democrats”. At that time the inconvenient and unpredicted truth was there had been no global warming for 18 years 9 months.

If, therefore, the new Pause continues to lengthen satisfactorily, and if – as now seems certain – the crippling consequences of the economic hara-kiri that the West has allowed certain hostile alien powers to inveigle it into perpetrating become all too painfully apparent even to the “Democrat” electorate, the fact underlying these long Pauses will become known not just to the open-minded few but to all, whether the climate Communists like it or not.

That fact is that the rate of global warming predicted by Hansen in 1988 and then by IPCC in 1990 is simply not occurring. Nothing like. In 1990 IPCC had confidently predicted warming equivalent to 0.34 K/decade in the period to 2030. Well, we are now already well into 2022, almost a third of a century after that over-excited prediction, and the observed warming was not the 1.1 K that ought to have occurred by now but just 0.45 K:

Thus, IPCC had predicted almost two and a half times the warming that has actually occurred in the third of a century since its prediction. Yet, as Dr Roy Spencer has just brilliantly pointed out at his website, the anthropogenic forcings are continuing to follow a pattern that would lead to a forcing equivalent to a doubling of CO₂ concentration by the end of the 21^st century, approximately in line with Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5, and not the deliberately extreme 8.5.

Yet the currently-predicted warming for a forcing equivalent to that from doubled CO₂, in the CMIP6 models (Zelinka et al. 2020), is 4 K/century equivalent, or 0.4 K/decade equivalent, up a little on the 0.34 K/decade equivalent predicted in IPCC (1990).

It has long been obvious from the temperature record that the rate of global warming is nothing like what was originally predicted: and yet the predicted warming in the models has officially increased. The decadal equivalent of the currently-predicted centennial rate of warming is now about thrice the observed decadal rate of warming.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. There is a reason why the models continue to predict about thrice as much global warming as is actually happening. But I trust that regular readers will not need me to tell them what that reason is.

Meanwhile, the temperature in England rose above 40 Cº one blissful day in July. Since I am used to living in hot countries, I astonished the assembled company by wearing a tweed jacket throughout the day. I’d normally have worn my heavy leather biker jacket, the best protection against hot weather, but I’m away from home just now. But I was the only person present who did not complain of the heat, for I was comfortably warm, not unbearably hot. I leave it to the reader to work out the sound science behind how that works.

Try it next time the weather is well hot, and you will see what I mean. I was once in Texas, where it was a little hot. I was wearing my biker jacket. Daisy the barmaid was baffled. I told her to put her hand between me and the jacket. She did so and was astonished at how cool it was. Us Brits have the neatest chat-up lines.

Of course, the unspeakable BBC blubbed about how dozens of people were going to be killed by the heat (in a good cold spell the weather can wipe out tens of thousands at a time).

But there is a growing impatience among the electorate at the one-sidedness of the global-warming argument, and at the failure of the BBC or any of the major channels to give both sides of the story. We are going to dump the BBC from our viewing altogether next month, as millions of others have already done. No more license fee for us.

Unfortunately, the relentless propaganda, and the increasingly vicious silencing of all who would otherwise have dared to speak out, have had their effect. I have recently discovered that neither the British intelligence services nor the Cabinet Office have the slightest idea that the global warming nonsense is not merely peddled assiduously by the Communist traffic-light tendency – the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds. It originated in the disinformation directorate of the KGB. But today’s spooks have no idea. One of them, who did not realize that my hearing is sharp, was overheard to say that I was “very Right-wing.” Moi? Zut alors!

Though the anti-social media giants will continue their campaign of outright Communist censorship, by a growing variety of samizdat methods the truth will emerge. Not long now, I think. The climate nonsense has almost run its course. It was all very well when there was little cost to it. But now that households all over the West are going bankrupt trying to pay their power bills and blackouts are only averted by panic measures, the people won’t stand for climate Communism much longer. In Britain on one recent day, the national grid paid more than $11,000 per MWh (or getting on for 400 times good old coal-fired power at $30 per MWh) to keep the lights on in London. And all this insanity on the basis of an elementary error of physics. (read more)

The Build Back Better monetary policy is successfully shrinking western economic activity; however, the impacted nations that produce goods for markets in North America and Europe, specifically southeast Asia, Japan and China, are not raising interest rates in an effort to try and offset the drop in demand.  China has announced they are dropping their central bank rates in a desperate effort to lower costs and keep their export dependent economy working.

Underneath all of this, is a drop in energy production in the same nations trying to lower economic activity.  The political policymakers are attempting to manage this process without informing the citizens of the unspoken goal.   Shortages of oil, coal and natural gas are self-inflicted problems, all part of the BBB agenda.

Beyond the massive increases in energy costs, which is the true source of inflation and a direct/intentional outcome of the BBB effort, Europe is now facing a looming [Grand Solar Minimum] winter without the energy resources to heat homes and sustain people.  Things are going to be very uncomfortable in Europe this winter as roaming brownouts are now predicted.

As the collective west attempts to, using their words, “manage the transition,” they do not have mechanisms to control an outcome of this magnitude.  It is simply too big a situation to manage.  Where the rubber meets the road, the think-tanks and high-minded climate change ideologues do not have the ability to manage a transition and still meet the needs of people.  Beyond the esoteric thinking, there are real consequences from these actions.

Many people have discussed the potential for longer-term food shortages and recently, shorter-term winter heating.  However, beyond that, the downstream geopolitical consequences are seemingly being ignored.  Instead, what we see is an effort to keep pretending the climate change ends will justify the means (disruption of energy production).

In this connected world, when the western nations stop buying things, we find ourselves domestically with economic trouble.  Businesses fail, unemployment rises, financial stress ripples throughout the economy, dependency on government subsidy increases and real pain is felt.  However, beyond the domestic issues the supplier nations run into even bigger problems.

Unemployment in Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and even China, creates an entirely different set of regional stability issues on a geopolitical level.

[Aside from the Central-Bank-created Great Depression of the 1930s] There is no precedent for this.  Never before in the history of industrialized nations has any government intentionally tried to lower its economic activity.  It has never been done with intent before because within the contraction nations get more poor, people suffer.

Not only has no single nation ever tried to intentionally shrink its wealth, but there is no precedent whatsoever for an alliance of nations to join together with the same purpose. While this might seem like an academic economic modeling exercise, unfortunately it is very real.  What I am describing is happening right now, and we had better start talking about it before the unforeseen consequences start to become a crisis.

In North America (U.S-Canada), Europe and Australia, there will continue to be massive increases in food prices as a result of the collapse in energy production.  Beyond the western nations there will be food shortages as a result of lowered harvest yields and less industrial food production.  This is not controversial.

It is also not controversial that regions with harsh winter climates are going to be paying much more for scarce heating resources.

That being accepted, what happens geopolitically, even militarily, when the entire global economy starts to feel the impacts from western nation economic contraction on a scale -created by collective action- that has never been seen before.

I have no idea what that big picture consequence looks like, but whatever “that” is, will be happening at the same time as people everywhere will be more desperate as an outcome of their economic position.  I don’t have the answers, but I sure as hell can see the problem coming.

Political leadership in the aforementioned western nations are seemingly, perhaps intentionally, keeping people distracted with domestic shiny things to occupy time.  However, someone needs to start talking about, and seriously challenging, the big picture consequence of this Build Back Better future, before it’s too late. (read more)

If the search warrant affidavit was revealed to the public, the DOJ Lawfare tribe targeting Trump – within the DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD), could not keep the benefit of selective leaks to their media stenographers.  It would be more difficult to frame the narrative.  [DOJ Filing pdf HERE]

On Thursday August 11th, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the justice department was committed to transparency in order to retain their integrity with the American public.  On Monday August 15th, Attorney General Garland asked the court to keep the records sealed.   The six-year pattern continues….

WASHINGTON DC – “If disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” U.S. Attorney Juan Gonzalez and Justice Department counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt said in a filing urging the continued secrecy of the affidavit.

“The fact that this investigation implicates highly classified materials further underscores the need to protect the integrity of the investigation and exacerbates the potential for harm if information is disclosed to the public prematurely or improperly,” the DOJ officials wrote.

That doesn’t make a clean single-color area for the president to operate in, however.  Rather, it generates a gray area largely governed by negation. It’s not actually simple – except from the standpoint that trying to find an enforceable provision of statute law that constrains the president to do things only in a certain way is a lot harder than just agreeing that his authority covers pretty much whatever he wants to do, with few exceptions.

Kerfuffle

The main restraints on the president are statutes that prescribe in advance the classification level of certain national security information, such as categories of information about U.S. nuclear weapons and some U.S. national technical means or human-intelligence means for intelligence collection.  Those prescribed classification levels, to the extent they are codified by statute, were voted on by Congress and signed into law by a president.  Even the sitting president can’t just deem qualifying information to be unclassified or less classified than prescribed in those statutes.  (He can choose to share it when it normally wouldn’t be – that’s a policy decision that statute law can’t eliminate his discretion over – but sharing it doesn’t declassify it.)

Virtually all of the information that that point applies to is enduringly significant information about the nature and capabilities – not the product – of the U.S. national security apparatus.

The product of intelligence collection is not handled by statutory prescription in the same way.  That product is what most of the public has passing familiarity with.  The product is time- and event-specific, and not only constitutes virtually all of what gets routinely declassified on age-out dates, but is routinely “sanitized” by authorities lower than the president to be used in less-classified or unclassified settings.  Similar though not identical points apply to classified information about U.S. operations, for which the most publicly familiar model is military operations.

As regards these types of classified information, the agencies writing the guidance for classification procedures and handling all work for the president.  Their baseline reference documents are a combination of presidential executive orders and departmental guidance documents (e.g., those maintained by the Departments of Defense and Energy, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence).

We’ve had an eruption of Sudden Classification Experts in the last four days, to go along with the laughably political drumbeat from Democrats and the media about “Trump ‘stealing’ Top Secret documents!” and “Nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago!” (which somehow quickly transitioned, in the space of a paragraph or so, to “Trump giving nuclear secrets to the Saudis!”).

I hope it goes without saying that the conclusions being leaped to by hostile media and anti-Trump politicians are utterly inane.  In very short order, the proponents are going to want us all to forget they ever said what they’ve been saying in the last few days.

No one actually knows the things they’re all so sure of.  That’s because there isn’t a written guidebook for what the president can and can’t do, in terms of declassifying operational or intelligence-product information, or in terms of keeping what are probably mostly copies of presidential documents at an ex-president’s government-authorized and -funded post-presidential office.

That’s prelude to the meat of this point, which brings in the guidance John Solomon referred to on Friday 12 August as meaning that the president can declassify whatever he wants, when and however he wants.

There’s an extent to which that’s true, but it has its limits.  It doesn’t apply to types of information whose classification is prescribed by statute.  It does apply to the operational and intelligence-product information that eventuates day to day in the life of the U.S. government, over all of whose executive-agency operations the president has the ultimate executive authority.

Hold that thought in your head now, as I spot you the references John Solomon spoke of.  One is Obama’s E.O. 13526 of December 2009.

The other is George W. Bush’s amendment to a Clinton E.O., 12958 of 1995, which Bush published in March 2003.

The content of the Bush and Obama documents is mostly the same.  Inspect them at your leisure.  These are the E.O.s from which Solomon got this paragraph in his 12 August article:

 “Information originated by the incumbent President or the incumbent Vice President; the incumbent President’s White House Staff or the incumbent Vice President’s Staff; committees, commissions, or boards appointed by the incumbent President; or other entities within the Executive Office of the President that solely advise and assist the incumbent President is exempted from the provisions of paragraph (a) of this section,” the Obama order stated.

According to Solomon, this provision is the basis for the practiced alluded to in his article, by which Trump had a standing order as president that anything he took to the residence to work on became declassified.

Solomon includes this update from a Trump source on Friday:

“He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified,” the statement added. “The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the President of the United States. The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat, with classification authority delegated BY THE PRESIDENT, needs to approve of declassification is absurd.”

That framing of the issue isn’t egregiously out of bounds.  Finding anything in law that makes the president conform his work habits to a paper-pushing bureaucrat’s approval schedule is no slam-dunk.

What it is, however, is non-customary, and off-center in terms of what’s being accomplished.  If POTUS’s goal is to work with classified material outside the West Wing, that’s what he has aides for.  Uniformed flag and general officers, who can’t get away with what the president (or, let’s be honest, the secretary of defense of the secretary of state) can get away with, typically make it their aides’ problem to tote around the classified material they need to work with away from their offices.

The president might do the same; e.g., have an aide retrieve whatever classified material he’s been working on when he’s done for the night, and make sure it magically appears when next the commander-in-chief needs it.

That said, I’m not going to second-guess the Trump administration’s practices.  Unlike Secretary Clinton, Trump’s White House managed to avoid spraying Top Secret documents through email servers around the world, and Trump has continued to manage that in the 18 months since he left office.

The sticking point is going to be what kind of classified documents are at issue in the Mar-a-Lago raid, and how other elements of government would know they’ve been declassified.

The wording in the two executive orders would have a fairly simple first-order reading.  Information originated by Executive Office of the President (and Vice President) entities is exempt from the handling requirements for declassification – those requirements typically written by subordinate agencies to deal with the agencies’ classified work product.

That reading doesn’t include, say, intelligence product reports from NSA or CIA that circulate in the EOP in some form.  However, the president is the ultimate classification authority for such products, whether for original classification or declassification.  Nothing in law says the president himself can’t declassify them, nor does anything affirmatively state that he – personally, himself – has to do so in accordance with the declassification procedures used by the relevant agency.  The latter concern depends largely on the purpose for declassification.

If the president wants the originating agency, other agencies, the other branches of government, or the public to know that the information has been declassified, that’s when he would do best to use the formal procedures that clarify exactly his intention.

Which is what Trump did at the end of his presidency with the declassification of Crossfire Hurricane material.  He had the material formally declassified in the guidance-prescribed manner, according to criteria of his choosing – which is his right as president – and communicated the result to DOJ.  That was because he wanted it to be published.

On the other hand, as far as we can tell – and it’s not very far, since we know practically nothing for certain – Trump doesn’t appear to have had the documents reportedly removed from Mar-a-Lago on 8 August formally declassified by bureaucratic paper-pushers.  (On the other hand, the documents from Mar-a-Lago may be the declassified files on Crossfire Hurricane. None of us knows one way or the other on that.  Kash Patel thinks they are.)

Such a procedure would include annotating the documents as declassified, striking through the original classification markings, and commemorating the act with reference to identifying document details (e.g., date and subject line) in a memo, email, etc.  A National Archives summary of procedures is here.  (It’s abbreviated but covers the basic.)

Whichever files they are, since the documents were just sitting there at Mar-a-Lago, it’s not clear how necessary the formalities would have been from a pragmatic point of view.  If harm was done to national security because an agency was not notified that its product had been declassified by the president, while the product’s content lurked peacefully, undisturbed, and made no mysterious appearance outside of secure venues, that would probably be a first in terms of harm-vectors.  We’d have to check.  The agency would have been treating the document(s) in question as classified anyway.

Of course – of course – such a situation is potentially problematic from the standpoint of general infosec (information security).  It’s no worse than what cabinet secretaries have been doing with email accounts and portable devices for the last 20 years, but it’s potentially problematic for the integrity of classification standards.  It’s worrisome practice.  At a given time, we may not be able to trust what a president is doing.

But what he’s doing isn’t inherently a criminal matter just because it’s questionable practice.  His political party may think what he’s doing is just dandy.  So might his voters.  The other political party may think it’s appalling.  Security mavens are likely to be taken aback and think it’s an a priori bad idea.

But presidential discretion doesn’t end where departmental regulations start – and the ultimate reason for that is that presidential actions are inherently disputable, first and foremost, as matters of policy, not of conformity with rules the president could rewrite overnight if he chose to.

Before wrapping this up, we should note that the statutes cited in the 5 August warrant aren’t about classification practice at all – nor are they about the president holding materials from his presidency after he’s left office.  That’s because there are no statutes that would support a probable-cause warrant premised on either consideration.

What Merrick Garland’s DOJ had to do to justify a warrant for boxes of documents was cite specific statutory misuses of classified information the former president might be engaged in.  There’s no evidence we’ve ever seen of any such engagement, but citing such statutes was the only way to justify going after the documents.

This is just one reason Garland is being skewered for the absurdly broad nature of the warrant.  It really is a case of “give me the crimes, I’ll find you the man.”  The warrant dangles statutes like carrots the horse can’t catch up to.  It’s written to justify seizing documents, not to aid the investigation of real, alleged crimes with a statutory premise.  It’s a fishing expedition.

But circle back once more to the bottom line stated at the top.  No one knows for sure all the things people have been stating with impressive certainty this week.  We don’t even know what was in the boxes.  Many jets need cooling.  Secure from Alert-5.

President Trump was, by his own account of the standing order for declassification, exercising discretion that as a general matter isn’t prohibited to him by law.  We have no idea if there are specific cases (e.g., the “nuclear information” allegation) where actual statutory constraints might be in play.  You don’t; I don’t; the Washington Post doesn’t.

The end result, if that point ever has a day in court, which it probably won’t, is likely to be that, sure enough, that’s what Trump was doing – exercising discretion – and the courts have no interest in legislating about it from the bench.  Congress might, I suppose.  I predict it will be the least of Congress’s worries, if we get to the day when all the shenanigans of the last 6-7 years come in for a thorough wirebrushing under a klieg light.

The RICO suit

The disposition of classified material isn’t really what this is all about anyway.

This section, we really will keep brief.  I want to address just three points.  One of them is pretty big, but has gotten little if any attention.  It’s at the end,

The first and easiest is that Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart – of Jeffrey Epstein defense fame – signed off on the Mar-a-Lago warrant for the U.S. District of Southern Florida a mere 44 days after recusing himself from the Trump RICO case against Hillary Clinton et al.

The list of recusals on the Trump RICO suit is impressive.  The first magistrate judge to be assigned recused the day after the case was filed in March 2022.  Reinhart himself was put on the case as magistrate judge in April because his predecessor recused.  Since Reinhart, three more magistrate judges have recused (here, here, and here).  The current magistrate judge, Patrick M. Hunt, has hung in there for about five weeks now.

But the RICO suit has a very interesting factor of its own to enliven this recusal history.  The day before Reinhart recused (that is, 21 June 2022), Trump’s counsel filed an amended complaint.  The original complaint was entered in March 2022; the amended complaint is a humdinger, more than doubling the number of facts asserted in evidence.

I haven’t had time to go through all the added facts (many of which, like the originals, come from John Durham’s court filings).  The amended complaint also added some defendants.  It was after this filing that the exit parade of magistrate judges began.

That brings us to the second point.  Also ensuing on the filing of the amended Trump complaint was a request from the U.S. Department of Justice (“United States”) to substitute itself as defendant for five of the original defendants:  Comey, McCabe, Strzok, (Lisa) Page, and Clinesmith.  The request was filed 14 July 2022.

Said U.S. Attorney Juan Antonio Gonzalez:  “Because plaintiff’s tort claims [against the five defendants] are based upon conduct within the scope of these former FBI employees’ employment with the government, the United States is the sole and exclusive defendant for those claims. … The Court should substitute the United States as defendant for James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Kevin Clinesmith.”

Then, inevitably:  “Upon substitution, the Court should dismiss the United States [as a defendant] for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.”

This was a big move by DOJ to get the Crossfire Hurricane/FISA-faking team out of the line of fire in Trump’s RICO suit.  Those who aren’t following the RICO suit closely probably haven’t even heard about it.  It’s interesting that DOJ asserts Kevin Clinesmith’s alleged behavior – falsifying claims for the FISA authorization on Carter Page – was conduct within the scope of his employment; but let that pass for the moment.

Here’s the really interesting thing, at point three.  The trial judge, Donald Middlebrooks, granted the motion to substitute on 21 July 2022.  He dismissed the FISA Five from the list of defendants and substituted the United States.  But he acknowledged Trump’s right to come back with counterargument on that, and he deferred ruling on the DOJ motion for outright dismissal, after the United States was substituted.

And that’s when DOJ, which had known about the material at Mar-a-Lago for months (since at least February 2022, if not before), and had sent the FBI to look through it on 3 June 2022, actually pounced.

On 4 August, Trump filed in opposition to the judge’s 21 July decision to substitute United States and dismiss the complaint against the FISA Five.  The opposition motion opened with this uncompromising Argument heading:  “DEFENDANTS ARE NOT ENTITLED TO WESTFALL CERTIFICATION AS THEY ACTED OUTSIDE OF THE SCOPE OF THEIR EMPLOYMENT IN MALICIOUSLY PROSECUTING PLAINTIFF.”

The same day, Trump filed opposing Hillary Clinton’s earlier motion to dismiss the RICO complaint (the Clinton motion having been made on the basis that Trump had failed to state a claim).  His counsel also answered in opposition to motions to dismiss from four other defendants.

The warrant for the Mar-a-Lago raid was requested and issued the next day, 5 August 2022.

The DOJ’s substitution move in July frankly shapes up as a tactic to put the United States into the RICO lawsuit as a defendant, where it wasn’t one before.  Then it’s followed by a fishing-expedition raid on Mar-a-Lago on a remarkably thin pretext, accompanied by a barrage of wild media speculation about nuclear secrets, espionage, Saudi Arabia, and my personal favorite (so far):  a theory that Trump’s possession of a file on Emmanuel Macron is connected to a scheme to give the Russians kompromat on the French president.

This is maneuver warfare going on, not the stately-paced pageant of law enforcement and jurisprudence.

It’s doubtful the purpose of leveraging the United States into the lawsuit was solely to get the suit dismissed.  If that doesn’t work, there are still things the United States can do that no other defendant can, to make Trump’s life as the plaintiff difficult.

If nothing else, the raid on Mar-a-Lago will probably succeed in getting material Trump may have hoped to bring in evidence to the RICO suit stamped all over with “pending federal case.”

If you think about it, DOJ already knew what Trump had on the DOJ/FBI RICO defendants sourced from classified federal records.  Trump had the information DOJ – and ODNI – already knew how to collect and assemble.  Perhaps he had more than was contained in the package of declassified materials he sent to DOJ in January 2021 for publication; perhaps he had only that.  If the Justice Department sought to verify such suspicions either way, it was during the FBI inspection at Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 that that was probably done.

But now, even if Trump had copies held separately and could still deploy the declassified materials to build a case for his RICO suit at trial, DOJ has its hooks in the information, and a damaging counter-narrative in the media already underway. (read more)

The unprecedented DOJ and FBI assault against President Trump continues.  President Trump gave an interview to Fox News to discuss:

(Via FOX) – […]  In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Monday morning, his first since the raid, Trump said he had his representatives reach out to the Justice Department to offer to help amid outrage over the FBI’s unprecedented raid on his private residence last week, in which agents seized classified records, including some marked as top secret. Trump is disputing the classification of those records, saying the records have been declassified.

“The country is in a very dangerous position. 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,” Trump said.

“If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that,” Trump said.

“There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country — at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times,” Trump said.

Trump told Fox News that his team “has not heard yet” from the Justice Department on whether they will accept his offer for help.

“I think they would want the same thing — I’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump said. “It is a very dangerous time for our country.”

He added: “I will do whatever I can to help the country.”

Trump, reflecting on the “years of fake witch hunts and phony Russia, Russia, Russia schemes and scams,” said that “nothing happens to those people who perpetuate that — nothing happens with them.”  (read more)

When the morality of nations becomes too inverted, they collapse and reassemble under tyranny. The historical record is clear.

In 1789, the French Revolution began. On paper it looked good — the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was heavily influenced by the American Declaration of Independence. Yet, our Revolution went from success to success while the French Revolution destroyed itself. As the saying goes, ‘The Revolution eats its own.’

Some say the French Revolution went awry because their founding document grounded human rights in the state rather than God, as the American Declaration did.

But, actually, the French Declaration did recognize natural rights as imprescriptible. They were inherent, not inventions of the state, and it proclaimed those rights as coming from the Supreme Being:

Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen.

And, the French Revolution accomplished positive changes as far as religious freedoms, liberating both Protestants and Jews.

So what went wrong?

Well, to put it bluntly, the lunatics usurped noble efforts. There was no internal brake on the French revolutionary government. Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just went insane.

All of France’s Christian history was tossed to the wind. The Revolutionaries tried to stamp out the faith, started the Deistic Cult of Reason, plundered Notre-Dame, and held a festival with idolatrous worship of the Goddess of Liberty:

In Paris in the Cathedral of Notre Dame the altar was replaced with an altar to Liberty. There were parades of girls dressed in white and the Goddess of Liberty was portrayed by Sophie Momoro wife of the organiser [sic]. Since the Festival some more interesting accounts of the event were told including tales of prostitutes dressed as Goddesses scantily clad and singing lewd songs. These are mostly likely exaggerations and pure inventions.

All the while, the Revolutionary government was killing anyone even suspected of counter-revolutionary tendencies. Those who were not radical enough were guillotined.

Insanity was the order of the day. Finally, Robespierre went one step too far, calling for more executions, the parliament revolted, and then came the Thermidorian Reaction, which ultimately led to the dictatorship of Napoleon — who oddly was still more progressive than most of Europe’s monarchs, but far from what the French Revolution had promised.

The revolution led to a dictator.

A century and a half later, the people of Weimar Germany believed their young republic was hopeless. Society had become anarchistic and degenerate. Berlin was the world center of sexual deviancy, as immortalized by playwright Christopher Isherwood, and later the movie Cabaret. The German people were fed up. So they voted in an authoritarian coalition, led by Hitler. But there was a competing power bloc in the Nazi party under Ernst Rohm, a homosexual pedophile, a radical anti-capitalist socialist, and leader of the Brownshirts.

Frankly, Rohm was unstable, just like Robespierre. His antics would’ve sunk the Nazi party, so the German Army told Hitler to get rid of Rohm, or they would get rid of Hitler.

Then came the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” where Nazi hierarchy killed the leaders of the Brownshirts. After that, Hitler consolidated the Nazi party, and in came real totalitarianism.

We see a pattern, when revolutionaries — the Nazis thought of themselves as revolutionaries — go too far, there is a swift, murderous, brutal, counter-reaction. The lunatic fringe goes first.

In France, the revolutionary Directory executed Robespierre and the more extreme elements. They had to, in order to preserve what was left of the French Revolution. Even then, the revolution failed and Napoleon eventually took over.

In Germany, Hitler had to get rid of the radical brownshirts. Officially, 85 leaders were killed. Estimates run much higher.

After the Soviets seized power in Russia, every leftist lunatic on the planet floated in, throwing Russia into a social maelstrom. The Bolshevik Revolution was on the verge of collapse, and then the Kronstadt sailors rose up in protest for more democracy. Finally, the Reds went full totalitarian, destroyed the rebellion, and set up the dictatorship. Lenin died, and Trotsky wanted a perpetual revolution which would have destabilized Russia further, so Stalin took over.

The pattern is clear. When lunatics take over a government, a strongman emerges, and sets up a dictatorship.

In the French revolution, it was ultimately Napoleon. In Germany, it was Hitler. In Russia, it was Stalin. In all cases, the final dictator undid the gains of the revolution, often being worse than the predecessor. They had to, or the society would have collapsed.

Even Napoleon. He may not have been a totalitarian, but his vainglorious wars of empire took more lives than the Bourbon monarchy ever did. Napoleon’s actions led to the death of millions of people.

The Stormtrooper homosexuals, who helped set up the Nazi government, wound end up dead or in prison. Stalin executed the old revolutionaries after show trials and kangaroo courts. Trotsky recognized the pattern and referred to Stalin as the Thermidorian Reaction.

If the LGBTQ and transexual extremists think that they are on the verge of victory, so did Robespierre, Ernst Rohm, and Leon Trotsky.

And the list is endless. Cromwell, who was an extremist, left a country so unstable that soon after his death, the English invited back the very monarchy of which Cromwell had dethroned.

Trump was not a Thermidorian reaction, but rather the last hope of decent government before a Thermidor becomes inevitable. The attack on Mar-a-Lago may be the last straw.

If the squad, the LGBTQ radicals, and the BLM activists do not back off, the result will be no better. They may think they can rewrite history and human nature, but they cannot. They may be working to pursue their goals to victory or the collapse of the USA.

If things get that bad — and I hope they do not — I sincerely hope this is all resolved constitutionally and peaceably — but if they do not back off, and if history is any clue, they will be the first ones to suffer. The clock will be rolled back, far back. They won’t know what hit them.

You can only push people so far and then comes Thermidor. (read more)

According to Manchin, his agreement to the current spending bill was contingent upon a promise that: (A) Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will generate a new bill for streamlined energy permitting and increased oil, gas and coal development; (B) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take up the Senate bill and whip enough of her House Democrat membership to join with Republicans in support of that Senate bill; and (C) Joe Biden will sign that increased energy production bill.

Here’s the important part.  Senator Manchin claimed he has leverage over Biden, Pelosi and Schumer to ensure a new bill with those priorities is created and advanced.  Manchin further claimed there were “consequences” for Biden, Pelosi and Schumer if they were to renege on the deal.  He is quite emphatic about that point if you listen to the NBC interview. (LINK)

The only possible leverage Manchin could have of such significance would be a threat to switch parties if Biden, Pelosi and/or Schumer reneged on the deal.  That would immediately flip the Senate.  In the latest development, the House democrats are threatening not to support the increased energy production and streamlined permitting part.

(Politico) – House Democrats managed to maintain party discipline in passing a historic climate bill heavily influenced by fossil fuel state centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) on Friday. But a contentious, intraparty battle on permitting of energy projects lies ahead.

Progressives ultimately supported the Inflation Reduction Act now heading to President Joe Biden’s desk despite it spending less to fight climate change than initially envisioned in the Build Back Better legislation. But they are now vowing to fight a secondary agreement struck by Manchin, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Biden to pass permitting reform legislation aimed at speeding up the building of oil and gas pipelines, green infrastructure projects and mines to dig up critical minerals.

“I am not going to be steamrolled into a bunch of fossil fuel give-aways just because Manchin cut a deal in a closed room with Chuck Schumer,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.). “He doesn’t get to run the show on something like this, and many of us will have a say on what that deal looks like if it even happens.” (more)

The barking moonbats were obviously not part of the negotiations.  However, if they dig in, we might find out what that leverage was that Joe Manchin was talking about. (read more)

To America’s political Left, serving its masters in the runaway deep state, reality itself must be portrayed as “baseless,” as in nothing to see here, folks. Is it any wonder, then, that half the country has gone mental. The reality they don’t want you to see is that the intel-and-surveillance agencies of our Republic have taken on a rogue life of their own as a dominant “fourth branch of government,” and that some time ago they embarked on a crime spree against anyone threatening their operations.

That would include especially target number one: Donald Trump. For a masterful explication of how this amazing clusterfuck developed, I commend you to The Conservative Treehouse website where the writer who styles himself as “Sundance” put together a four-part report on how the original sin of RussiaGate metastasized into the stage-four cancer of institutional necrosis that culminated in this week’s raid on Mar-a-Lago.

The gist is: it turns out that the president does not have sole authority, in practice, to declassify and release government documents. With the rise of the security state, many new procedures have been erected within that massive labyrinth to prevent it or slow-walk it. The most effective has been to make the president himself a target of, or a material witness in, drawn-out investigations. That was the exact purpose of the Mueller exercise. Any exculpatory documents released by Mr. Trump — for instance, the complete unredacted text exchanges of FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — could have been used to hang an obstruction of justice charge on the president.

Mr. Trump adroitly avoided that trap, and many other legal pitfalls the deep state laid for him, and might have won reelection but for the well-organized ballot fraud of 2020. But the epic blunders of “Joe Biden” are giving Mr. Trump, and the movement behind him, a pretty good shot at routing the incumbent regime. Doing so, first in the 2022 midterms and then in the 2024 presidential election, portends a now quite visible effort coming to dismantle that reckless, unelected “fourth branch” of government. So, the intel-and-surveillance agencies are fighting for their lives — and the actual humans in charge must be keenly aware of their criminal liabilities.

Despite all attempts to disable him in office, Mr. Trump, as president, got to see an awful lot of classified material, including all the evidence of Hillary Clinton’s Russia Collusion hoax, abetted by the FBI, the DOJ, CIA, and DOD, plus all the lawless shenanigans that took place in the FISA court. A lot of it was assembled when, late in the game, Mr. Trump was finally able to appoint Directors of National Intelligence he could trust — Ric Grenell and then John Ratcliffe — who wrested many documents out of the foot-dragging agencies. Further maneuvers by artful Attorney General William Barr — the appointment of John Durham as Special Counsel and his drawn-out investigations — kept Mr. Trump from releasing any declassified RussiaGate material ever since. The catch was: he still had bales of that evidence in his possession among the personal papers he took with him from the White House.

Now, it also happens that in March of this year Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in Florida against Hillary Clinton and many entities and persons who abetted the construction of RussiaGate. The person assigned to preside over the case was magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart, a one-time DOJ attorney who had been involved in the 2007 Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking prosecution, and who then mysteriously switched sides in mid-litigation and signed on as a lawyer for Epstein. Epstein was soon let off of serious charges with a wrist-slap, amid suspicions that he was an intel agency operative who required protection. And, of course, now Mr. Epstein is dead, offed under highly mysterious circumstances while in federal custody.

Bruce Reinhart was involved in the 2013 government defense of IRS officer Lois Lerner, who never answered for targeting conservative organizations for tax punishment and “losing” thousands of emails pertaining to the cases. Bruce Reinhart also left a long record of social media posts denouncing Mr. Trump for one thing or another. Yet, he remained as presiding judge over the Trump lawsuit against Hillary, et al., in Florida since March and then suddenly recused himself on June 22 of this year. Naturally, many of the aforesaid unclassified documents in Mr. Trump’s possession would be introduced as evidence in an effort to prove that Hillary Clinton sought to defame and defraud him over the confected Russia Collusion story.

And so it happened that Bruce Reinhart was just the right person for the FBI to seek a warrant from, though the choice looks ludicrous now. And hence, the desperate raid on Mar-a-Lago to get that trove of evidence, especially with an election looming that could transform congress and lead next year to a raft of investigations into the corrupt intel-and-surveillance deep state. Of course, it’s laughable to imagine there aren’t copies of all that material in other places, so it’s not as though the FBI can make the evidence just disappear. But the apparent object of the move is to hastily convict Mr. Trump in a DC federal district court on any Mickey Mouse charge involving his dispute with the National Archives that would, theoretically, prevent him from running again in 2024.

One must wonder if Mr. Trump did not catch the FBI (and DOJ) in a “rope-a-dope” operation of his own. He’d just come off a successful primary season in which over 90 percent of his endorsees won their races. The midterm elections look increasingly dire for the Democrats, the Party of Chaos, as led by the transcendentally incompetent “Joe Biden.” In June, Mr. Trump had met at Mar-a-Lago with FBI agents and produced many documents requested under a subpoena. Were the FBI and DOJ alarmed by what Mr. Trump handed over then, and did it suggest there was plenty of other material, possibly more damaging, in the former president’s collection headed into court? The momentous lawsuit against Hillary — which gets no coverage in the Left agit-prop news media — is not over.

In any case, the FBI and DOJ ended up embarrassing themselves with the August 8 Mar-a-Lago raid, an act as ham-fisted and tone-deaf as any in the nauseating annals of “Joe Biden’s” sinister regime. They outed themselves as an American Gestapo, dedicated chiefly to persecuting the ruling regime’s political enemies, and they probably succeeded in galvanizing even sturdier opposition to be expressed at the polling places this November, at great peril to the agencies’ officers, and perhaps even the agencies’ continued existence. (read more)

Despite former President Donald Trump suggesting federal agents may have planted evidence during their raid of his Mar-a-Lago resort this week, he and his family were able to see “the whole” operation on security camera footage, one of his lawyers revealed Thursday.

“It’s kind of funny. I think the folks in New York, President Trump and his family, probably had a better view than I did because they had the CCTV, they were able to watch,” Christina Bobb told Real America’s Voice.

“I was, you know, I was stuck in the parking lot there to you know, collect paper and answer questions,” she added. “But they were actually able to see the whole thing. So they they actually have a better idea of what took place inside.”

According to Bobb, the FBI initially instructed Mar-a-Lago staff to turn off all the surveillance cameras in Trump’s residence. However, the 45th president’s legal team ensured that they would remain operational.

“The cameras were only off for a very short period of time,” Bobb said.

Since Monday’s raid, Trump has repeatedly suggested that agents could have placed incriminating information or evidence in his home, with his attorneys unable to observe the search.

“The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday.

“Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.’ Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out? Obama and Clinton were never ‘raided,’ despite big disputes!”

Neither the former president nor members of his family have publicly said that they were able to observe the raid. Trump was in New York when the raid took place.

A representative for the 45th president did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for confirmation.

Bobb’s revelation came hours after Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Department of Justice wants to unseal the search warrant and the property receipt listing the items seized from Mar-a-Lago – barring any objection from Trump or his legal team.

The former president enthusiastically encouraged the unsealing of the documents late Thursday. However, his lawyers will still have to formally inform US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart by 3 p.m. Friday that they have no objection to the release.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that the FBI had been looking for “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” as part of its search. The report did not provide further details — including whether any such documents were uncovered or whether they pertained to US weapons or those of another country.

Friday morning, NewsNation reported that the agency found “dozens” of classified documents that were being kept in two areas of the estate — Trump’s personal office and a separate storage room. (read more)

The affidavit allegedly asserting probable cause has not been made available to the public by the DOJ or the federal court that sealed it. The search warrant was signed on Aug. 5 and gave authorities two weeks to conduct the unprecedented raid. The federal magistrate who signed the warrant previously donated thousands to former President Barack Obama. Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination was invalidated after Donald Trump became president in 2017, acknowledged that he personally signed off on the raid in a Thursday press conference. Garland also claimed the search was conducted with a narrow scope.

“First, I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” Garland said. “Second, the department does not take such a decision lightly. Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”

On Monday, three days after the warrant was signed, FBI officials conducted the hours-long raid of the 128-room estate which reportedly included an intrusive search of former First Lady Melania Trump’s wardrobe. While ostensibly executed under the pretext of violations of the Presidential Records Act, a law that rarely results in prosecutions, the raid has become the latest episode of Democrats weaponizing the Justice Department to go after political opponents, with Trump at the top as public enemy No. 1.

According to Fox News, law enforcement officials say they confiscated classified documents. Trump, however, says documents were declassified.

“Number one, it was all declassified. Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything,” the former president said on TruthSocial. “They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request… They could have had it anytime they wanted–and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?”

The DOJ-NSD warrant, and the subsequent raid on Mar-a-Lago can only be related to records the U.S. government deems “classified” and material vital to national security interests.  Hence, DOJ National Security Division involvement.

In prior outlines we have exhaustively covered the details of President Trump’s desire to publicly release information about DOJ and FBI conduct in their targeting of him during the fabricated Trump-Russia claims.  However, to understand the nature of the documents he may hold, we first review the declassification memo provided by President Trump to the DOJ upon his departure from office.

In broad terms there are two sets of documents that intermingle and are directly related. First, documents that highlight the activity of Hillary Clinton’s team in creating the false Trump-Russia conspiracy theory (2015/2016).  Second, documents that highlight the activity of government officials targeting Donald Trump within the same timeframe (Crossfire Hurricane), that continued into 2017, 2018 and 2019 (Robert Mueller).

Think of the two sets of documents as evidence against two teams working in synergy.  Team one (Clinton) was outside government. Team two (DOJ/FBI) was inside government.  The documents pertain to both groups but are also divided.  That helps to explain the wording of the memo above.

We can extract a lot of information on the first sets of evidence from the lawsuit filed by President Trump in March of this year, mostly against the outside actors. [LINK HERE]

The lawsuit was filed against specific persons and most of those persons were interviewed by the FBI as part of the originating investigation.  Within the subjects of the lawsuit we find names and groups including:

Hillary Clinton, Hillary for America Campaign Committee, DNC, DNC Services Corp, Perkins Coie, Michael Sussmann, Marc Elias, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Charles Dolan, Jake Sullivan, John Podesta, Robby Mook, Phillipe Reines as well as Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr, Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, Neustar Inc., Rodney Joffe, James Comey Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith and Andrew McCabe.

In addition to being named in the lawsuit, many of those names were interviewed by the FBI as part of the origination of the Trump-Russia investigation, and/or part of the ongoing investigation of the Trump-Russia fabrication. Each of those interviews would carry an FD-302 report summarizing the content of the interview, the questions and answers given.

The totality of those 302 documents is a lot of evidence likely consisting of hundreds of pages.

For the government officials on the inside, in addition to 302’s (ex Bruce Ohr) there would be documents of communication between them.

Think about the full unredacted text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok as an example.  The DOJ publicly released over 600 pages of those text messages, and that wasn’t all of them.  The text messages were also redacted, under claims of privacy and national security.  We can assume any version of these text messages declassified by President Trump would not be redacted.  Hence, you go back to the January 20th memo and see the notes about “privacy.”

We also know there are many pages of communication between DOJ lawyer Lisa Page and her boss in the FBI Andrew McCabe.  Almost none of them were ever made public; but they exist.  This internal communication is likely the type of material contained in both the “binder,” left for the DOJ to release, and the boxes at Mar-a-Lago to be used as evidence against the named defendants in the lawsuit.

Bruce Ohr has 302’s and emails relating to his involvement as a conduit between Fusion GPS and the FBI.  Some of those were released in redacted form, and some of them were never released.  Additionally, Nellie Ohr, Bruce’s wife, who worked at Fusion GPS invoked spousal privilege when called to testify before the House committee investigating the issues.  However, it is almost certain the FBI interviewed her so there are likely 302’s on Nellie Ohr.

Then we get to the big stuff…. The records and evidence in unredacted and declassified state, that would drive the DOJ-NSD to claim vital national security interests.

The NSA compliance officer notified NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers of unauthorized use of the NSA database by FBI contractors searching U.S. citizens during the 2015/2016 presidential primary.  That 2016 notification is a classified record.

The response from Mike Rogers, and the subsequent documentary evidence of what names were being searched is again a classified record.  The audit logs showing who was doing the searches (which contractors, which agencies and from what offices), as noted by Director Rogers, was preserved.  That is another big-time classified record.

In addition, we would have Admiral Rogers writing a mandatory oversight notification to the FISA court detailing what happened.  That’s a big and comprehensive classified record, likely contained in the documents in Mar-a-Lago… and then the goldmine, the fully unredacted 99-page FISA court opinion detailing the substance of the NSA compromise by FBI officials and contractors, including the names, frequency and dates of the illegal surveillance.  That is a major classified document the Deepest Deep State would want to keep hidden.

These are the types of documents within what former ODNI John Ratcliffe called “thousands of pages that were declassified by President Trump,” and given to both John Durham and Main Justice with an expectation of public release when the Durham special counsel probe concluded.

In short, President Trump declassified documents that show how the institutions within the U.S. government targeted him.  However, the institutions that illegally targeted President Trump are the same institutions who control the specific evidence of their unlawful targeting.

These examples of evidence held by President Donald Trump reveal the background of how the DC surveillance state exists.  THAT was/is the national security threat behind the DOJ-NSD search warrant and affidavit.

The risk to the fabric of the U.S. government is why we see lawyers and pundits so confused as they try to figure out the disproportionate response from the DOJ and FBI, toward “simple records”, held by President Trump in Mar-a-Lago.   Very few people can comprehend what has been done since January 2009, and the current state of corruption as it now exists amid all of the agencies and institutions of government.

Barack Obama spent 8 years building out and refining the political surveillance state.  The operators of the institutions have spent the last six years hiding the construct.

President Donald Trump declassified the material then took that evidence to Mar-a-Lago.  The people currently in charge of managing the corrupt system, like Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, Chris Wray and the Senate allies, are going bananas.  From their DC perspective, Donald Trump is an existential threat.

Given the nature of their opposition, and the underlying motives for their conduct, there is almost nothing they will not do to protect themselves.  However, if you peel away all the layers of lies, manipulations and corruption, what you find at the heart of their conduct is fear.

[...]

People forget, and that’s ok, but prior to the 2015 MAGA movement driven by President Donald J Trump, political rallies filled with tens-of-thousands of people were extremely rare; almost nonexistent.  However, in the era of Donald J Trump the scale of the people paying attention has grown exponentially.  Every speech, every event, every rally is now filled with thousands and thousands of people.

The frequency of it has made us numb to realizing just how extraordinary this is.  But the people in Washington DC are well aware, and that makes President Trump even more dangerous.  Combine that level of support with what they attempted in order to destroy him, and, well, now you start to put context on their effort.

The existence of Trump is a threat, but the existence of a Trump who could expose their corruption…. well, that makes him a level of threat that leads to a raid on his home in Mar-a-Lago. (read more)