Former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday and excoriated the Justice Department for conducting today’s raid on the residence of a former president and current rival to the sitting POTUS. As we’ve been reporting, hundreds of FBI agents descended onto Donald Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, and left with many boxes of evidence. Whitaker told fill-in host Will Cain:
I just think this is an outrageous expansion of the FBI’s—really, I don’t know how else you say it—attack on Donald Trump for the last six years…
We’ve crossed the Rubicon to some extent. This is something from banana republics, not the United States of America.
Whitaker believes President Joe Biden would not have been consulted about the raid, but that Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray both almost certainly would have had to sign off on the criminal investigation that led to it.
I would be surprised if this Department of Justice allowed Joe Biden to be involved. That would obviously be a line that shouldn’t be crossed in a criminal investigation. But yes, I would expect that Chris Wray and Merrick Garland both signed off on the criminal investigation of Donald Trump.
Whitaker served as Acting Attorney General from November 7, 2018, to February 14, 2019, after Jeff Sessions resigned. He also accused the Justice Department of politicizing the institution:
It’s hard not to believe that these [actions] are politically motivated. I have spent seven and a half years at the Department of Justice. It’s an institution that should be trusted, but they have eroded that trust to a point now, where I think, to your point earlier, they have a burden to demonstrate that this investigation is not completely politically motivated after Hillary Clinton walked scott-free for the last seven years.
What happens next? Whitaker thinks things are only going to get more problematic:
This is where the American people need to ask very difficult questions. Congress needs to ask very difficult questions. Because at the end of the day, if they’re really planning to bring Donald Trump to Washington, DC in front of a Washington, DC jury and a Washington, DC judge, you know, this republic is maybe not strong enough to bear that burden ultimately. But we will see.
The FBI is into an unprecedented area. The Department of Justice under the Democrats leadership I think is going into a very dangerous field right now.
Monday’s raid adds to the disturbing trend of the FBI to mount junta-style investigations and raids on Trump supporters and opponents of the Biden administration. They came after Roger Stone in 2019 like he was a dangerous terrorist, conducting a dawn operation with heavily-armed agents to bring him into custody for allegedly making false statements to Congress. Just last month the FBI repeated their antics, conducting yet another raid on a former Trump Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who had to beg to be allowed to put on his pants. Add to the list the raid of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe’s home in November 2021, and it becomes pretty clear that what we have here is a pattern.
This descent into banana republic politics is dangerous to our nation. Turning our Justice Department into a Democrat-armed force to intimidate political foes and their supporters is un-American. We can only hope Republicans do in fact dominate the midterms and put a stop to this nonsense.