Monthly Archives: August, 2022

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state's two U.S. senators are warning of the "weaponization" of the U.S. Department of Justice after the FBI on Monday raided former president Donald Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago estate.

They did so after the former president announced on his Truth Social platform that his home was “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents” over a document dispute. The raid was unannounced, “not necessary or appropriate” and “prosecutorial misconduct,” Trump said.

The White House, Department of Justice, and FBI have yet to release a statement in response to numerous media inquiries.

DeSantis issued a statement from his campaign Twitter account, saying, “The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.”

Florida’ senior U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican, published a video message online, warning that the FBI’s tactics were like those of a third-world dictatorship.

“We’ve had divisive politics and anger in our politics for as long as this country’s existed," Rubio said. "... But the one thing we’ve never had is we’ve never been a country where people who take power, like becoming president, now use that power to persecute their past or political opponents. We’ve never seen that until … the Justice Department under Joe Biden decided to raid … the home of the former president who might … be running against him ...

“This is what happens in places like Nicaragua where last year every single person who ran against Daniel Ortega for president, every single person that put their name on the ballot, was arrested and is still in jail. That’s what you see in places like Nicaragua. We’ve never seen that before in America. You can try and diminish it, but that’s exactly what happened.”

The FBI agents weren’t looking for a fugitive, he said, or tracking down “some serial killer or drug kingpin,” but engaged in “a high-profile raid over a document dispute.”

Document disputes aren’t new, Rubio added.

“Multiple administrations have had disputes over the archival office over what is a presidential record and what isn’t,” he said. Sending 30 FBI agents was done for “one purpose … to try to politically harm and intimidate their political opponents.”

Pointing into the camera, presumably to President Joe Biden, Rubio said, “You’re playing with fire. This is dangerous. Because someone else will be in power one day and now you have created the precedent for them to do this back to you. And then we become the third world. And then we lose our country. And our system of government and the meaning of being one nation under a real constitution. This needs to stop.”

The people responsible for the raid, he said, Attorney General Merrick Garland and the director of the FBI, “need to be held to account for going along with something so undemocratic, unconstitutional, and flat out dangerous and destructive to our republic.”

He also pointed out that the FBI “isn’t doing anything about the groups vandalizing Catholic churches, firebombing pro-life groups or threatening Supreme Court justices.”

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said the FBI’s raid was “incredibly concerning, especially given the Biden admin’s history of going after parents and other political opponents. This is Third World country stuff. We need answers …”

In response to DeSantis’ statement, Florida Agriculture Secretary Nikki Fried, a Democrat running for governor, said, “Your tweet is another escalation of your pathetic loyalty to an insurrectionist over country and the rule of law.”

The Democratic Party of Florida said of DeSantis, “This wanna be autocrat weaponizes every state agency against his enemies, targets marginalized communities for political gain, incarcerates people for protesting, while handing out billions of our tax dollars to his donors and raises taxes on us.”

It added, “Law and order though, right Ron? Aren’t you firing people for not following the law? How many laws does Trump have to break?”, referring to DeSantis removing a prosecutor who said he wouldn’t be enforcing state law.

Some social media users asked if DeSantis would work with local sheriffs to prevent FBI raids of Floridians in the future. The Florida Standard reported that the “DeSantis administration did not know about nor worked with FBI or DOJ on the Mar-a-Lago raid.”

The raid came two weeks after U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray, notifying them of FBI whistleblower allegations of a coordinated effort to cover up the alleged criminal activity of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

“If these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and FBI are – and have been – institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law,” Grassley wrote, adding there were “systemic and existential problems within your agencies.”

Grassley sent a letter May 31 detailing alleged violations of federal laws by Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault “based on a pattern of active public partisanship in his then public social media content.” Gressley requested information “so that Congress can perform an objective and independent review of the alleged misconduct,” but received no response.

The raid also came after multiple attorneys general sued the Justice Department after it began investigating parents who speak out at school board meetings, and without evidence, labeled them “domestic terrorists.”

One of the parents being investigated was a Florida-based Moms for Liberty advocate. Its founders said the DOJ “was using counter-terrorism authority under the PATRIOT Act to investigate parents of schoolchildren who were exercising their first amendment right to petition their local government for a redress of grievances.” The group warned that if law-abiding parents were being targeted by the FBI, anyone could be.

Former President Donald Trump said his Mar-A-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, was "under siege" and raided by FBI agents on Monday.

Trump made the comments in a post on his social media platform Truth.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” Trump wrote, adding “These are dark times for our Nation …”

Various media outlets cited anonymous sources who stated the raid was part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents that were classified and may have been at Trump’s Florida home.

Trump, who was in New York at the time of the raid, said it was done by a large group of FBI agents and was unannounced.

“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024 …” Trump wrote.

Trump said the FBI agents also broke into his safe.

“What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democratic National Committee?” Trump asked.

The former president added that America has become a “broken, Third-World” country that was “corrupt at a level not seen before.”

The Justice Department and White House declined comment to various media outlets.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, on his personal Twitter account, criticized the raid and contrasted it with the lack of prosecution of and media scrutiny into President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, who made large sums of money in business dealings overseas while his father was vice president, among other allegations against Hunter Biden.

"The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves," DeSantis wrote. "Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic."

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 would increase taxes on nearly every American despite claims made by President Biden.

“When we pass the Inflation Reduction Act, not a single American in the middle class will pay higher taxes,” Biden tweeted.

According to analysis by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, nearly all Americans would see increased taxes by 2023. The average tax rates would increase in nearly all income categories, according to its analysis, including lower income individuals such as those earning less than $10,000.

Federal taxes will increase by $1.9 billion on those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 and by $10.8 billion on those earning between $100,000 and $200,000 in 2023.

Overall average tax rates would increase from 20.3% to 20.6% in 2023 alone, according to the analysis.

According to the bill summary, “There are no new taxes on families making $400,000 or less and no new taxes on small businesses – we are closing tax loopholes and enforcing the tax code.”

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who’s spearheaded the bill, says it will pay down the national debt, and lower energy and health-care costs.

“Over the last year, leaders in Washington have ignored repeated warnings about the severe threat of inflation and the consequences of unprecedented domestic spending,” Manchin said. “Despite these concerns and my calls to give the country time to fully realize the impacts of such historic levels of spending and our inflation crisis, many Democrats have continued to push for trillions more in spending to meet a political deadline.

“Contrary to foolish talk otherwise, America cannot spend its way out of debt or out of inflation.”

The way to do this, he argues, is through “tax fairness,” including imposing a domestic corporate minimum tax of 15% on billion-dollar companies or larger. The bill also would spend more money on “technologies needed for all fuel types – from hydrogen, nuclear, renewables, fossil fuels and energy storage – to be produced and used in the cleanest way possible.” The technologies will help reduce domestic methane and carbon emissions and “decarbonize around the world as we displace dirtier products.”

The $400 billion bill won’t raise any taxes, he argues.

But The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues that’s exactly what it will do. The bill is “a tax increase on nearly every American,” they write. “Raise the corporate tax rate, and you’re cutting wages and salaries for workers.”

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee argue the same. They warn it’s full of “hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful inflationary spending [and] won’t reduce the deficit.”

“Rather than reduce inflation, it puts inflation on steroids,” they argue. It includes a “socialist drug price setting scheme [that] will likely cause drug prices to increase for patients for the next few years, all while killing future cures from ever coming to market.”

It also includes “expensive wasteful Green welfare,” they add, including Green New Deal tax credits of $257 billion and solar company loan guarantees of $250 billion that “will worsen our inflation problem, on top of government checks to subsidize luxury electric vehicles.”

Rather than tax the richest companies, it instead includes “handouts to the wealthy,” they argue, including “tens of billions of dollars in Obamacare subsidies [that] will flow to the well-off. It also increases taxes and fees on oil production and methane, which Republicans argue will result in higher gas prices, larger heating bills and higher consumer prices.

“When made permanent, Obamacare bailouts will cost $248 billion, four times higher than what Democrats’ bill admits. Meanwhile, Obamacare has already resulted in higher health care prices and 17 percent health insurance inflation,” they add.

The bill also includes a provision to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to begin auditing more than a million Americans, including lower income taxpayers.