What’s Behind The Pre-Dawn FBI Raid On Trump’s Former Campaign Chair?

The FBI conducted a pre-dawn raid on president Donald Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort on July 26. There was no warning that this raid would occur, but with a search warrant, the FBI seized documents and other records.

If you guessed that the FBI is on a witch hunt over Russian election meddling, you’d be correct. Those “close to the investigation,” according to the Washington Post, said that this is an attempt to find any evidence at all that would provide even a hint of the Russians meddling in the 2016 presidential election. (The same meddling that produced not one single changed vote.)

The day before the raid, Manafort met voluntarily with the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Manafort had also been voluntarily turning over documents to the council. The search warrant indicates investigators may have argued to a federal judge they had reason to believe Manafort could not be trusted to turn over ALL records in response to a grand jury subpoena. They also indicated that this may just be a “message” to Trump associates.

It could also have been intended to send a message to President Trump’s former campaign chairman that he should not expect gentle treatment or legal courtesies from Mueller’s team.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who has received her fair share of “legal courtesies” from the FBI. “If the FBI wanted the documents, they could just ask [Manafort] and he would have turned them over,” said one adviser close to the White House. The Washington Post reported that the seized items included documents had already been turned over and that Manafort complied with the search of his Alexandria home. But a more in-depth look at the reporting could give us a little bit of a clue as to why Manafort is under so much pressure.

[Special council Robert S. Mueller III] has increased legal pressure on Manafort, consolidating under his authority a series of unrelated investigations into various aspects of Manafort’s professional and personal life. Manafort’s allies fear that Mueller hopes to build a case against Manafort unrelated to the 2016 campaign, in hopes that the former campaign operative would provide information against others in Trump’s inner circle in exchange for lessening his own legal exposure. –Washington Post

How does anyone read that and assume that this is anything less than a witch hunt? It looks like some will stop at nothing to make whatever concocted narrative they come up with sticks like glue for the sake of politics. There is a desperate attempt to pin “Russian election meddling” on the Trump team, whether there is direct evidence or not, and the propaganda is evident.

Manafort has handed over documents pertaining to his meeting with a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump Jr. The documents are said to include notes Manafort took while attending a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016. Emails show Trump Jr. took the meeting and invited Manafort after he was promised the lawyer would deliver damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a political ploy. But that information is out now, proving Hillary Clinton did have deeper ties to Russia than Donald Trump, and the media killed the story.

CNN themselves even boldly admitted that the Russian narrative is a witch hunt. There are plenty of reasons to be upset with Donald Trump as president, but there’s been no real evidence that Russia was able to change a single vote during the 2016 presidential election. So how could their alleged meddling have mattered anyway? Leave it to the government and their lap dog media to make sure they keep pushing this propaganda down the throats of the weak-minded.