Calling the Blowhard's Bluff

 

     There are four major takeaways from Merrick Garland's literally unprecedented speech at the DOJ at 3 o'clock today:

     1) I personally signed off on the search warrant that was executed at Mar a Lago last Monday morning.

     2) The DOJ always seeks the least intrusive means to obtain the evidence or information for which we seek.

     3) Please stop saying mean, nasty, horrible things about my people.

     4) Since you refuse to release your copy of the search warrant and inventory of materials we'd sought, I'm calling your bluff and releasing them myself, you bloated fucking blowhard.

     OK, maybe Garland didn't say those last four words, but he could have and should have, since it seems every right winger on Capitol Hill plus the Gateway Pundit from his boiler room workspace beneath a Turkish takeout joint on K Street hates Garland's guts and, apparently, the rule of law.

     Federal Florida Magistrate Judge William Matthewman gave Trump's lawyers until 3 PM tomorrow, or 24 hours after Garland's brief speech today, to cough up the search warrant and inventory on their own before he allows Garland to unseal it.

     My two cents? Trump is going to fight it with everything he has down to his last injunction filing. He will not want the country to know what he stole from the White House. However, Trump would serve himself in the short term at least by releasing the search warrant himself. There are a couple of reasons for this:

     First off, as former state and federal prosecutor and senior CNN legal analyst Elie Honig stated yesterday in a lengthy Twitter thread, until and unless criminal charges in this matter are filed against Trump, the affidavit, which Trump doesn't have, will remain sealed. But secondly, what won't remain sealed, as Honig stated in the fourth part of his thread, are the "attachments", as they're known, in which the DOJ will list the parts of the US Code they suspect of being broken.

     Whichever way he plays it, Donnie Dumbo is screwed just for taking classified documents out of the White House and to a storage locker to languish with lawn chairs and umbrellas (No, really) instead of relinquishing them to the National Archives as he was supposed to do under federal law. And if you're expecting Trump to do the right thing for once in his life, keep in mind that while Mar a Lago was getting searched on Monday morning, he was busy invoking the 5th nearly 450 times before Letitia James and her investigators during his deposition.

     Which, as Trump himself had said in 2016 regarding Hillary Clinton, is something only the mob does.