The real reason the DOJ hasn’t carried out a search warrant (yet) at Donald Trump’s Bedminster home
On social media right now, internet sleuths are sounding the alarm about the possibility that Donald Trump might have also hidden classified documents at his other home in Bedminster, and they’re urging the DOJ to search Trump’s Bedminster property right away!
Of course back in the real world, the DOJ obviously hasn’t just naively overlooked the possibility that Trump might have hidden classified documents in his summer home. It’s actually laughable to even suggest that the DOJ is too obliviously naive to have thought to look at Bedminster. It’s obviously been on the DOJ’s radar all along. So why hasn’t the DOJ searched there?
The answer surely lies in the Mar-a-Lago timetable. The DOJ knew for several months that Trump was hiding classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago home, before it went in with a search warrant. Why the delay? For one thing, the DOJ had been working with unnamed cooperators inside Mar-a-Lago who had been helping to identify the precise locations of the documents. If something is in a trap door or hidden safe that you might not be able to find in real time simply by going in with a warrant, you’ll want to have your insiders poke around beforehand and find all these hidden areas first, so you know where to look once you’re in.
Then there’s the fact that the DOJ had two of Trump’s lawyers sign a document back in May affirming that all classified documents had been returned. If this was a trap laid by the DOJ, then Trump’s lawyers walked right into it. This means they’ll have to stop representing Trump, and may have to testify against him in order to avoid prison themselves. To this end, Trump attorney Christina Bobb reportedly just hired an attorney of her own.
So this is what all was going on in the several months before the DOJ ultimately went into Mar-a-Lago with a search warrant. It wasn’t a matter of the DOJ being “slow” or “timid” or any of the silly nonsense that gets tossed around on social media. It was a matter of setting up a winning strategy before going in. And when you look back, you realize the Feds had a close eye on Mar-a-Lago the entire time.
Given all that, it’s fairly obvious that the DOJ has also had its eyes on Trump’s other two homes, Bedminster and Trump Tower, all along. Given the methods the DOJ is known to have used in this case, it’s nearly a given that it also cultivated cooperating witnesses inside those two properties, to help determine if Trump had any classified documents hidden in there.
As for why the Feds haven’t (yet) gone into Bedminster or Trump Tower with a search warrant, they’ve either already determined there aren’t documents there, or they’re busy carrying out the same kind of smart strategy they used leading up to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. It’s just basic logic: why would the DOJ approach Trump’s other two homes any differently than it approached Trump’s main home?
Some folks on social media have an almost tendency to presume that the DOJ and the Attorney General are a bunch of naive, hapless, timid buffoons who have no idea what’s going on. But if anything, for someone to think the DOJ is too naive to look at Bedminster, requires a certain level of naivete on its own. You may or may not approve of the specific timing and strategy that the DOJ is using in this Trump probe. But to presume that the DOJ is a bunch of morons, with no strategy at all, is silly. The DOJ has certainly had its eye on Bedminster since long before anyone tweeted a clever idea about it.
