Our friend Julie Kelly has a post to her must-read substack exposing an exhibit filed by former President Donald Trump in a motion to suppress evidence seized during the FBI’s August 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago. The motion revealed shocking new details about the FBI’s plans to use deadly force and even engage the former president and his security detail in a
gunfight if they resisted the Democrats’ operation to seize the documents Mr. Trump retained at his Florida estate.
The document is just one of many court filings recently ordered unsealed by Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the matter in southern Florida.
Let this sink in: Court exhibits reveal the FBI was authorized to use deadly force against former President Trump and his security detail during the government’s Mar-a-Lago raid! The FBI raiding party included a medic. Their operations orders included directions to a nearby trauma center.
The raid involved 25 Miami FBI agents, four Washington FBI agents, one unidentified individual from FBI Headquarters, one DOJ attorney, and the assistant U.S. Attorney from the Southern District of Florida.
But according to the operations order, law enforcement was not preparing a routine search for presidential papers. One section of the plan described how agents should handle the potential for use of deadly force:
The head of the Washington FBI Field Office at the time was Steven D’Antuono. In addition to spearheading the criminal investigation into the events of January 6, which included his inability to identify and charge the so-called pipe bomber, D’Antuono led the Detroit FBI Field office in 2020 when the FBI manufactured an entrapment scheme to make it appear that Trump supporters plotted to kidnap and kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. D’Antuono retired in November 2022.
Attorney General Merrick Garland approved the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago. And the contingent instructions stated if any resistance was offered the FBI were to use deadly force against the former President of the United States.
What was the likely outcome if President Trump had shown up and tried to prevent the FBI from, say ransacking his wife’s lingerie closet, as documents unsealed prove that they did?
Once unleashed, one can only assume that the FBI would proceed according to its plan for the Mar-a-Lago raid and the past practices of federal law enforcement, which has been to use deadly force at the first sign of resistance.
In 2023, just a year after the Mar-a-Lago raid, Craig Deleeuw Robertson of Provo, south of Salt Lake City was killed by the FBI when they conducted a pre-dawn raid on his home after he posted online threats against various public figures, including President Biden.
Neighbors described Robertson as a frail, elderly man — his online profile put his age as 74 — who walked with the aid of a hand-carved stick, the Associated Press reported. Though he regularly carried guns, they said he didn’t seem a threat. However, Mr. Robertson allegedly “resisted” the FBI as they broke into his house and ended up dead.
Mr. Robertson maintained a fairly regular routine and could have been easily arrested outside his home, but it appears the FBI chose the most dangerous method of apprehending him to send a message to anyone else who was inclined to express themselves in similar terms.
What’s more, it is not unknown for the FBI’s lethal force policy cited above to be violated. The F.B.I. faulted agents in 2019 for misusing their guns in two separate shootings, according to reporting by The New York Times:
The first involved an agent in Arkansas who shot at — but missed — a suspect who was driving away to flee arrest. That agent resigned before he could receive a 55-day suspension without pay. The other involved an agent in California who fatally shot a family dog that he said bit him during a “family dispute” while he was off duty; he got a five-day suspension…
The rigor of the F.B.I.’s internal review process is important because local police often defer to the bureau to investigate shootings by its own agents. Under its deadly force policy, agents are only permitted to fire their guns, outside of practice ranges, if they reasonably believe that the target poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to someone.
So, if the FBI’s policy is no deadly force unless a target poses imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to someone, why the elaborate plan for a potential shooting at Mar-a-Lago?
One obvious conclusion is that they were hoping that Mr. Trump would offer them the same opportunity for an extrajudicial killing that Craig Robertson offered them.