A week after the FBI visit to President Trump’s home at Palm Beach, Florida, scratching around to find an explanation for official conduct has enabled a few plausible scenarios to start to emerge. It is possible to concede that there is some merit in the righteous wailings of the more vociferous anti-Trump press that the 30 agents who swarmed the palatial club and residence were not conducting a “raid.”

It was, they unctuously intoned, a legal proceeding authorized by a Judge for an important legal purpose and therefore could not be so cavalierly described. The FBI agents involved and the officious forces that accompanied them purported to ban the former president’s counsel from being simultaneously with them in any of the many rooms that they searched.

That included rummaging through the cupboards and bureau-drawers of Mrs. Trump, and they remained in the former president’s home for nine hours. So the escapade is better described as an “invasion” or an “occupation” than a raid. The “judge” who authorized it was really a magistrate, more a county clerk than a member of the judiciary.

The judge is also an active and unoriginal Trump-hater on social media, a journeyman South Florida lawyer who had been on both sides of the Epstein case and had had to recuse in a matter where the former president was involved once before, because of his notorious anti-Trump bias.

The attorney general’s comments on the invasion and occupation were the least he could get away with after the longest delay (three days) that even the Biden regime’s most shameless apologists were prepared to accept. He confined himself to an acknowledgment that he had authorized the invasion and implied that the buck stopped with him and did not ricochet to the president whom he serves.

Beyond that, there was the customary smoke screen that an investigation was in progress and so he could not respond to questions about it, meaning that there would be extensive comment in diluvian leakage through the regime’s principal house organs, the Washington Post and the New York Times, and elsewhere.

It would not have been this Justice Department without the obligatory nauseating pieties about no one being “above the law,” which in practice now means that the Justice Department will contort and misapply civil and criminal procedure to harass and defame Republicans as egregiously as they wish and rely upon the sordid and vacuous echo chamber of the national political press to maintain a collective straight face as they tiresomely recite mantras about matters being legitimately under investigation, despite accidental coincidences of timing and potential political impact.

The best guide to what really motivated this action is in the evolution of the semi-official leaks over the last week. Initially there were portentous intimations that Justice was seeking evidence to facilitate criminal charges in respect of the January 6, 2021, incident at the U.S. Capitol.

This appeared almost at once to be mere hopefulness by the operators of the leak-conduits, and after a brief pause with some nonsense about nuclear secrets, it quickly settled into squalid bickering over what belongs in the national archives and what goes to the presidential papers and library, when it is constructed.

These latter abrasions occur with the retirement of all presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt set up the presidential libraries program. (He built his own, adjacent to his home, in the latter half of his second term, fueling the assumption that he would be retiring, but then enjoyed the use of the library in his third and fourth terms.)

With Richard Nixon, the Justice Department reneged on the arrangements that had been agreed over his papers as president and vice president, but with private sector contributions he built his own library and eventually his literary executors won the prolonged litigation and retain greater influence over his papers than those of any other president; it was Mr. Nixon’s ultimate posthumous victory over his many tormentors.

These are not criminal matters, they did not under any conceivable circumstances justify a warrant to ransack a former president’s home and the attorney general’s mealy-mouthed haverings last week were an affront to the over-invoked and terribly undermined notion of the rule of law.

As the days went by after the FBI visit to the former president’s house, the steady retreat in the moralistic pomposity of the officious leaks and the rather relaxed, contemptuous dismissals of the affair by President Trump and his legal team incite the clear inference that this is not a legally substantive matter.

It seems rather to have been a weak and thoroughly brow-beaten attorney general feebly responding to demands that he keep the Trump defamation campaign going, since that is the only consistent argument the Democrats have had for the last six years, and throughout that time they have shown no inhibitions whatever in corruptly misusing the justice system to advance it.

The sanctimonious claptrap about an investigation in progress was instantly invoked, even in such obvious matters as to why it required 19 months after Trump left office for official concerns to become aroused to this extent, and why a normal subpoena was not used. 

There was no hint why it came to this even though the ex-president had been cooperating, and why there was such a contrast between this quasi-military operation and the docile acceptance of Hillary Clinton’s destruction of 33,000 subpoenaed emails and her use of a home-server to deliver a large quantity of confidential emails to the attention of the Kremlin.

By the end of last week, the official leak-inundation operation was representing that the Republican response to the FBI’s derring-do in Palm Beach was itself a lawless incitement to disrespect for the forces of law and order. It would have been challenging even for these wizards of the absurd to have produced a more ludicrous change of the narrative than this.

If it is possible to graft any tactical framework for this fatuous enterprise, it would be that the Democratic strategists reasoned that although the House of Representatives is almost surely lost in November, there might be a chance of salvaging the Senate if, by creating circumstances in which the polarizing controversy of Donald Trump’s close involvement in what is now the run-up to the next presidential election, might assist some Democratic senatorial candidates running against Trump-backed opponents. 

The Democrats seem to have convinced themselves that however incompetent and unpopular the present administration may be, they retain a chance of defeating Mr. Trump himself if he is the Republican candidate in 2024.

They could have sensibly reasoned that throwing a grenade like the assault on the former president’s house into the political arena at this point would be outrageous enough to solidify the ex-president as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for 2024 and to arouse the large number of people who view with alarm any return by the former president to come to the aid of Democratic candidates in the approximately eight toss-up races for the Senate in November.

This makes some political sense, but of course, like the Trump-Russian collusion fraud and the spurious impeachments, it has no legal justification at all. Mr. Trump has calmly called for de-escalation, and the return of seized privileged material. His passports were already returned to him, NBC News reported. There is also a danger that this assault has been so preposterous it may drive some independents into Trump’s corner. If this is as shabby as it appears, those responsible should be sacked, and where applicable, disbarred; someday, perhaps.