The Profound Irresponsibility of the "Deadly Force” Frenzy
The Profound Irresponsibility of the "Deadly Force” Frenzy
Right-wing media figures and politicians are playing with fire with the notion that Donald Trump could have been "taken out" during the Mar-a-Lago search.
On Tuesday, much of the political right was whipped into a frenzy over the supposed “bombshell” discovery, from recently revealed court documents, that the FBI authorized the use of “deadly force” in its warranted search of Mar-a-Lago in 2022.
That operation, you may recall, resulted in the retrieval of boxes of classified material improperly taken by Donald Trump before he left office. Trump is currently facing criminal charges over his refusal to return the material.
The “deadly force” hysterics began with right-wing, self-proclaimed investigative journalist Julie Kelly. Upon broadcasting the revelation, Kelly stated that armed FBI agents “were preparing to confront Trump and even engage Secret Service if necessary.” She claimed they were “going to go door to door to terrorize MAL guests,” which “risked the lives” of Donald Trump and his family.
“People need to be arrested for this,” Kelly added, comparing the tactics used by the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland to the Gestapo.
Within a matter of hours, Kelly’s assessment was all over the Internet, and being amplified by Fox News, right-wing radio, and Republican office-holders.
Donald Trump himself soon weighed in. He again called the “raid” illegal and unconstitutional, and he further argued that the issuance of “deadly force” proved that President Biden is a “threat to democracy.”
“The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light,” declared Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Other right-wing firebrands followed suit.
These were extremely serious accusations, of course — a former president of the United States being, at best, placed in the middle of an armed conflict… and, at worst, targeted for assassination by our own government.
The good news is that none of it was true.
Well, one part of it was true. “Deadly force” was indeed authorized. That’s because it’s authorized literally every time the FBI has an operations order, which includes the execution a search warrant… anywhere and to anyone. It’s standard policy, designed for the protection of the officers serving the warrant and any other individuals at the location. Furthermore, it applies only in a situation in which the agents find themselves or others in “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.”
As former Trump DOJ official Sarah Isgur pointed out online, “Yall think we let law enforcement walk around with guns and don’t tell them when or how they’re authorized to discharge their weapons? Or you think we disarm them for certain search warrants of favored people? Nope nope nope.”
In fact, the “Deadly Force Policy” section has been pre-filled in on every FBI operations order since the year 2000.
Oh, and one more thing — a reminder of sorts… The DOJ and FBI coordinated with the Secret Service and local law enforcement beforehand, to ensure Trump wasn’t even at Mar-a-Lago when the FBI search took place. By design, there was never even the slightest possibility of the operation causing physical harm to the former president.
As Steve D'Antuono, former FBI assistant director, testified before Congress last year, the agency was extremely careful to carry out the operation in as non-confrontational of a manner as possible:
It wasn't even a show of force, right, because we were all in agreement. We didn't do a show of force, right. I was adamant about that, and that was something that we agreed on, right, the FBI agreed on, right. No raid jackets, no blazed FBI. We interact. We made sure we interacted with the Secret Service to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues. We're not banging down any doors. We weren't bringing any like FBI vehicles, everything that was reported about helicopters and a hundred people descending on, like a Die Hard movie, was completely untrue, right. That is not how we played it.
In other words, the “deadly force” brouhaha was totally baseless — a phony uproar that never would have found oxygen if any of the players in the political-media, from the supposed “investigative reporter” to America’s number one cable-news network, would have simply taken a few minutes to actually dig into the matter.
The fact that they didn’t, and perhaps didn’t want to, is beyond reckless. Trump supporters engaged in a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol just a few short years ago over an arguably less explosive premise than a sitting U.S. president targeting a former one for assassination.
Do these people even care, in their ongoing quest for attention and ratings, if they spawn more political violence?
The answer, at least for some of them, seems to be no. Even with the narrative having been thoroughly debunked, Kelly and others (including on Fox) are still fanning the flames. So is Trump himself, who’s now claiming in a campaign email that President Biden “was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
This is so grotesque and incredibly irresponsible that it’s almost harder to imagine how it won’t lead to more violence.
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