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Opinion

FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate will lead to prosecution

Ben Weingarten Federalist Senior Contributor; Claremont Institute Fellow
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The FBI raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate has further divided the country, with the Left looking for an indictment and the Right for a 2024 reelection. Adding fuel to the fire, just last week New York State Attorney General Letitia James conducted a deposition of Trump related to his organization’s real estate holdings, during which he invoked the fifth amendment over 500 times. Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten argues there is a regime persecuting the former president that will not stop until he is prosecuted:

It wasn’t enough for The Regime to concoct claims of treasonous Russian collusion to spy on candidate Trump, then use a series of “investigations” to destabilize his administration and cover-up The Regime’s corruption.

It wasn’t enough for The Regime to stage not one, but two, asinine impeachments, while its bureaucrats subverted and sabotaged President Trump—halting a genuine peaceful transfer of power, and depriving us all of four full years from which we all would have more richly benefited.

It wasn’t enough for The Regime to do everything in its power to “fortify” the 2020 election against President Trump, just as it won’t be enough for The Regime to disqualify him from the 2024 ballot—in defense of “democracy” of course.

The Regime wants President Donald J. Trump arrested, shackled, and left to rot in prison for the rest of his life. That is what the Mar-a-Lago raid is all about. It far transcends the midterm elections, or the 2024 horse race. It is the latest, but the most dramatic, earth-shattering, and unprecedented attack in a string of them, led by a vengeful and bloodthirsty Ruling Class whose Deep State serves as the tip of the spear. 

This raid was conducted by an agency that considers itself so untouchable that its leader deemed it acceptable to cut short a Senate oversight hearing days before the raid was set to happen, to jet off to a mountain retreat.

That’s how powerful the Deep State believes itself to be, and the contempt for which it holds not just Congress, but you, the people Congress is supposed to represent.

This raid is the first in a series of events that I believe will culminate in the attempted prosecution of Trump.

It wasn’t enough for The Regime to concoct claims of treasonous Russian collusion to spy on candidate Trump, then use a series of “investigations” to destabilize his administration and cover-up The Regime’s corruption.

It wasn’t enough for The Regime to stage not one but two asinine impeachments, while its bureaucrats subverted and sabotaged President Trump—halting a genuine peaceful transfer of power, and depriving us all of four full years from which we all would have more richly benefited.

It wasn’t enough for The Regime to do everything in its power to “fortify” the 2020 election against President Trump, just as it won’t be enough for The Regime to disqualify him from the 2024 ballot—in defense of “democracy” of course.

The Regime wants President Donald J. Trump arrested, shackled, and left to rot in prison for the rest of his life. That is what the Mar-a-Lago raid is all about. It far transcends the midterm elections, or the 2024 horse race. It is the latest, but the most dramatic, earth-shattering, and unprecedented attack in a string of them, led by a vengeful and bloodthirsty Ruling Class whose Deep State serves as the tip of the spear. 

This raid was conducted by an agency that considers itself so untouchable that its leader deemed it acceptable to cut short a Senate oversight hearing days before the raid was set to happen, to jet off to a mountain retreat.

That’s how powerful the Deep State believes itself to be, and the contempt for which it holds not just Congress, but you, the people Congress is supposed to represent.

This raid is the first in a series of events that I believe will culminate in the attempted prosecution of Trump.

And has anything we’ve seen in the last five years convinced you that he’d get a fair hearing in front of a jury of his peers, overseen by an independent and impartial judge?

The specific legal grounds for the raid—supposedly about maybe sensitive documents that Trump had already been cooperating with authorities for months to produce, but which led reportedly to even agents rifling through his wife’s wardrobe—like the grounds for the coming indictment, are really beside the point.

The presumption should be that this was a fishing expedition borne of a “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” injustice system.

Trump’s crime was, and always has been, that he threatened The Regime’s power and privilege—in so doing, representing tens of millions of Americans who The Regime considers an impediment to its total control, and who it hates.

That’s all the “predication” The Regime needed to pursue him the time he he burst onto the political scene and threatened the power and privilege of The Regime.

Having suffered what it saw to be a near-death experience in the election of Donald Trump, The Regime must now use shows of force and intimidation to demonstrate that anyone and everyone from the lowliest of non-violent January 6-ers held in pretrial detention for months on end, to Trump himself can, and will, be crushed if they dare to not submit.

If you’re not in jail, they’ll break and bankrupt you by process in forcing you into court, smearing you in the press, and trying to make you toxic at your workplace and in your community.

Those celebrating the Mar-a-Lago raid, and all these outrageous attempts to criminalize politics they disagree with, are condoning the very authoritarian behavior they claim to decry.

They are cheering on the transformation of America into something beneath a banana republic.

They’re celebrating the devolution from the greatest nation in the history of mankind into a decaying and decadent dictatorship of the Woketariat.

Every critical institution is being, or has been turned, against itself, and trained on the very public it was supposed to serve.

The raid of the estate of a president by a lawless security apparatus on behalf of his successor is nothing less than the crossing of a civilizational Rubicon.

It has created an existential crisis. We face a time for choosing far darker than when Ronald Reagan invoked the phrase. Today, our choice is between a totalitarian regime, and the Americans it seeks to persecute. Those who are silent will be complicit in the horrors to unfold.

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