Donald Trump's allies have struggled to respond to a report that the FBI was searching for nuclear documents at Mar-a-Lago.
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Trump’s Allies Have No Clue How to Respond to Report of Nuclear Docs at Mar-a-Lago
Republicans in Congress and the conservative media are plum out of talking points following the revelation that the FBI may have been searching for material pertaining to national security
Republicans in Congress and right-wing media talking heads have been having a conniption since the FBI raided
Donald Trump’s
Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday. They haven’t had as much to say, however, since Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the Justice Department
intends to make the search warrant public and
The Washington Post reported that the raid focused on documents relating to nuclear weapons and other classified intelligence information. The relative silence has persisted into Friday as
The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI
retrieved boxes of “top secret” material during the search, and as the
warrant revealed that Trump is under investigation for potentially violating the Espionage Act, destroying records, and obstructing justice.
Scott MacFarlane of CBS News reported that a group of House Republicans who were planning on taking the Justice Department to task on Friday have
canceled the news conference. Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, held a news conference with a separate group. It didn’t go very well.
The group mostly just regurgitated talking points about Biden weaponizing the Justice Department, and when pressed on whether they were concerned about “unsecured classified information potentially being in a storage area in Florida.” Turner said they were more concerned with the tactics the Justice Department used to retrieve the information
before arguing that “Donald Trump has more classified information in his head than he does in his desk.”
OK.
Turner continued to try to tamp down concern, arguing the classified material
may not have been “truly classified,” and that it maybe even could have been something “you could find on your own phone.”
Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) added that the information
may have had something to do with aliens.
This is the best Republicans have been able to muster since the news about the nuclear nature of the search broke on Thursday. Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee
could only manage to complain about the fact that the information had allegedly been leaked. The ranking Republican on the committee, Ohio’s Jim Jordan, has as of Friday morning only been tweeting about Democrats and taxes. Same goes for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and other Trump-loving members of Congress who blew their tops on Monday after Trump announced the raid.
Trump, too, has had a tough time ginning up ways to rationalize the news. “President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” he
wrote on Friday morning. “How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!” The National Archives quickly released a statement explaining that the 30 million pages of unclassified records in Chicago are stored in a National Archives facility and under complete control of the National Archives.
The countless right-wing commentators who raged after the raid on Monday have been pretty quiet, too, as Ron Filipkowski, who tracks right-wing social activity on social media, pointed out Thursday night.
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