So much for “search Bedminster!”
Yesterday Jack Smith brought a superseding criminal indictment against Donald Trump which revealed the fact that the Feds have already retrieved the classified document that Trump was famously waving around at Bedminster while he was being recorded illegally discussing it.
There’s a large and very loud group of folks on social media who spend every day chanting “Why don’t they search Bedminster!” This has been going on ever since the Feds searched Mar-a-Lago last year. In fact “search Bedminster” has become such a slogan and rallying cry, folks have begun automatically chanting those words any time any news about the case breaks at all. But as I’ve tried to spell out all along, that “search Bedminster” slogan has been based on two utterly ridiculous false premises.
First of all, “search Bedminster” is based on the notion that the Feds either didn’t know Bedminster existed, or were too timid to search it. That’s laugh out loud absurd. The Feds are not the kind of hapless naive morons who simply forgot that Trump spends nearly half the year at a secondary residence. Nor would it make any sense that, even though Feds forcibly searched Trump’s primary residence, they were somehow too timid to search his vacation home. The entire notion is chuckle worthy.
Then there’s the false premise that simply searching Bedminster would somehow magically solve everything. Maybe that’s how things work in the TV mystery movie of the week. But in the real world, we’ve already seen that it doesn’t work that way. It’s long been reported that before the Feds went into Mar-a-Lago, they first cultivated sources inside Mar-a-Lago who could help them figure out where the documents were being hidden, and help figure out who else needed to be pressured into cooperating.
So it was almost a 100% certainty that the Feds were taking the same approach with Trump’s other residences such as Bedminster: find cooperators within the property, collect information about what was really there, and make plans for retrieval. The only difference was that in the end the Feds concluded that they needed a formal search and seizure operation at Mar-a-Lago based on what was there, and they concluded that a different approach was best for Bedminster.
We still don’t know what that approach was. But we do know that the Feds managed to retrieve that infamous Bedminster classified document, and probably did a long time ago. Does this mean that one of the Feds’ cooperators tracked down its location in some secret Bedminster closet and covertly retrieved it? Does it mean that the Feds determined that the document had already been taken elsewhere, and seized it there?
We’re not going to get an answer on that right now, and given that this is classified information, we may not even get an answer during the trial. But it is now abundantly clear that the Feds took Bedminster seriously from the start, and one way or the other, managed to retrieve the classified military document that Trump was caught on tape waving around there. However it was obtained, we know that the retrieval of that document did not involve simply knocking on Bedminster’s front door with a warrant and a hundred agents and then blindly searching a giant property for it.
There are often far smarter ways to succeed in your goals than just taking the most simplistically aggressive approach you can think of. The Feds managed to obtain that crucial Bedminster classified document without following the simplistic “search Bedminster” advice being chanted on social media all day. That’s because for the most part the Feds know what they’re doing, while people who try to make themselves look smart by chanting dumb slogans on the internet all day don’t actually know anything. Yesterday’s superseding indictment proves these types have no idea what they’re talking about.
So let’s move on from this era where someone can tweet something as flat out stupid as “search Bedminster” and get a million retweets and followers out of it. That kind of simplistic sloganeering is always aimed at eliciting an immediate emotional reaction from you, thus preventing you from even thinking it through before amplifying it. All it does is lower the political discourse. The Feds were taking Bedminster seriously the whole time because of course they were. And the reason the Feds were able to retrieve the Bedminster document is that they used smart investigative techniques, instead of following the simplistically dumb advice being chanted all day on social media.
