Commentary
The FBI has raided Donald Trump’s home in Florida and opened a private safe, hanging around for hours looking for classified material that might be there. They were likely looking for items that Trump believed he had declassified—the president can do this with anything—but is still holding in his possession.
Top officials of the National Archives, the DOJ, and the FBI believed otherwise and thus sought the search warrant. If the New York Times is correct, then, this is really about state secrets. Trump wanted them public. Others inside the deep-state machinery disagreed.
The scene in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, gives rise to images from societies without law and constitutions, places where regimes are merely juntas seeking plunder and revenge. In this case, the problem is complicated by a mass administrative state apparatus that lives outside the democratic process….