More than a week after the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound for stolen classified documents, CNSNews was still largely serving up biased “news” defending Trump and attacking law enforcement. One of the few exceptions to that is an Aug. 19 article by Susan Jones throwing shade at Trump’s legal team for not being aggressive enough in countering the raid:
The Trump legal team did not file a motion of its own, nor did it join another motion arguing for the full release of the affidavit underlying the search warrant for Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home.
Why not? Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked Trump attorney Christina Bobb Thursday night:
“We believed that Judicial Watch and some of the other parties actually had argued it quite well,” Bobb responded, “and we believe it was very interesting and somewhat encouraging that you had parties from both sides of the aisle — of course, liberal media outlets coupled with conservative watchdog groups really together on the same side.
“And so we were curious to see how that played out, of course, you know, reserving our rights to try something else in the future if we want to, but we really just chose to see how it will play out.”
Bobb disagreed that the Trump team has now waived its right to dispute anticipated Justice Department redactions to the affidavit.
CNS did find its way back to being a Trump propagandist. Craig Bannister declared in an Aug. 25 article:
Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA) has filed a complaint against the judge who approved the warrant to raid former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, seeking the magistrate’s dismissal from the case and removal from the bench.
The complaint, filed with the Judicial Council of the Eleventh Circuit, accuses Florida-based Judge Bruce E. Reinhart of “unethical and prejudicial conduct” and of having a “conflict of interest and a pattern and history of hostility to President Trump.”
An anonymously written Aug. 26 article seemed to complain that “The affidavit that the Biden Justice Department presented to a federal court in Florida in order to get a “warrant to search and seize” at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home cites as part of the legal authority for this action an Executive Order issued by President Barack Obama.” Another article that day by Bannister hyped a right-wing writer (whose ideology he did not identify) mocking redactions:
“Transparency is one of DOJ’s and FBI’s passions,” Sean Davis, co-founder and CEO of “The Federalist” sarcastically tweeted Friday, after the release of a heavily-redacted copy of the affidavit used to justify a warrant to raid former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
In a series of tweets, Davis razzed the FBI and DOJ for its lack of transparency regarding its unprecedented raid of a former president’s home.
Bannister made no mention of the fact that purloined classified documents are at the heart of the Mar-a-Lago search, meaning that it’s absolutely prudent to redact certain information because, you know, it’s classified.
Jones served up more uncritical whining in an Aug. 29 article from a Republican senator, Roy Blunt, complaining that he hadn’t been tipped off to the search, though she did highlight how evasive Blunt was in refusing to directly answer the simple question of whether it was right for Trump to take classified documents that were not his. Then it was more right-wing fearmongering courtesy of Bannister:
The FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago wasn’t just an attempt to get former President Donald Trump – it was also meant to frighten and intimidate the American people, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) warned Tuesday.
“Here is just another example of ‘The rules don’t apply in this particular case, because it’s Donald Trump,’ Rep. Jackson said, calling the raid nothing more than a “fishing expedition” in an interview on Fox & Friends First.
“It should infuriate every single American and it should make us all scared, because this was done for two reasons,” Jackson said. While the raid was intended to hurt Trump politically, it had an even more sinister purpose – to send a threatening message to all Americans:
[…]“No one trusts the FBI or the DOJ anymore. I don’t trust them any further than I can throw that entire building,” Rep. Jackson said.
Since the vast majority of American have never stolen classified government documents, they likely have nothing to worry about from the FBI or DOJ.
An anonymously written Sept. 5 article hyped a pro-Trump judicial ruling:
Federal District Judge Aileen M. Cannon issued an order today requiring that a “special master” be appointed to review what the Justice Department seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home when it was raided last month by the FBI.
In the order, the judge said that the FBI had seized “medical documents” from Mar-a-Lago.
[…]The judge also said in the order that Trump faces “potential harm by way of improper disclosure of sensitive information to the public,” and “risk of suffering injury from the Government’s retention and potential use of privileged materials in the course of a process that, thus far, has been closed off to Plaintiff and that has raised at least some concerns as to its efficacy, even if inadvertently so.”
Unlike with Reinhart, CNS did not mention that Cannon was appointed by Trump, which raises questions of bias regarding her pro-Trump rulings.