On Wednesday, Newsweek ran an exclusive story saying the raid on Mar-A-Lago came following reports from an FBI confidential human source (CHS) — that’s official terminology for “mole,” “informant” and “spy” — from inside Trump’s home. (NOTE: this sure looks to us like the sort of planned media “leak” the intel community is so practiced at, to further their own narrative.) According to their report, the spy said Trump had classified documents at Mar-A-Lago and described where the documents were.

SOP for the FBI — When It Comes to Donald Trump

Well, well. When it comes to Trump, this seems to be standard operating procedure for the FBI. Just as they spied on him before and during his presidency, they apparently continue to spy on him afterwards. Who knows if there really was a “mole,” but I’m sure we don’t have to remind Trump and his staff that they’d better sweep the entire place for bugs, especially now that scores of FBI agents have spent hours picking through every room of the house and pawing through Melania’s closet. (And by the way, if the spy could tell them where these alleged documents were, why did they go through every room of his house?)

Also, since Trump and his family weren’t there during the search, and his attorneys weren’t allowed to witness what the FBI agents did, there’s no way Trump can prove they didn’t plant evidence. One encouraging bit of news: though household staff were told by the FBI to turn off the security cameras, they reportedly did not.

Eric Trump says attorney Christina Bobb was forced to stand at the far end of the driveway during the raid. According to her, at first they weren’t going to show the warrant to her at all, saying they didn’t have to. (!) Eric said they showed it “from about 10 feet away.” It was also partially sealed, according to Bobb, so she couldn’t read why the judge had granted it.

Here’s more from Bobb.

File This Under ‘Snowflake’

As the story goes, this whole thing started when the head of the National Archives, Obama appointee David Ferriero, saw Trump on TV on Inauguration Day leaving the White House and getting into the Marine One helicopter. Ferriero told The Washington Post in May, “I can remember watching the Trumps leaving the White House and getting off in the helicopter that day, and someone carrying a white banker box, and saying to myself, ‘What the hell’s in that box?’”

He was so concerned, he said, that he called the “Justice” Department and alerted them.

That sounds very much in character for this strange man. As Jesse Watters reported last night, Ferriero is such a leftist, “he took it upon himself” to add a trigger warning to the Declaration of Independence at the Archives. You and I revere that sacred document and “hold these truths to be self-evident,” but his concern is apparently for the emotional well-being of people who have a problem with that.

Ferriero said and did nothing to try to get back the many thousands of documents that Hillary had spirited away to her home. When President Obama left office, he took 30 million documents away with him on trucks for his to-be-built presidential library in Chicago. Who ever gets to see those? He promised to have them digitized and available online, but reportedly, not a page has been processed. And President Biden’s vice presidential documents are locked away tight at the University of Delaware. Considering what might be in there, I wonder if they’ll ever see the light of day.

A bit more insight into Ferriero: He said that January 6th was the worst day of his life (though he wasn’t there, of course). And when he retired in April of this year, he reportedly said to President Biden, “Just don’t hire a white male to replace me.” Good grief.

Don’t Call it a ‘Raid!’

On MSNBC and CNN, they made a huge point of not calling the raid on Trump’s home a “raid,” even though that’s exactly what it was: a raid on steroids, in fact, with 20 cars, lights flashing up and down the road, and 30+ armed FBI agents. They went through the house for 12 hours, not 9 as had earlier been reported. We’re still waiting to see the warrant and attached paperwork for this raid. As far as we know at this writing, even Trump’s attorneys still don’t have a copy.

We couldn’t help noticing that The New York Times, in their Wednesday newsletter — by the way, please read ours instead unless you want your head to explode — also used the word “search” instead of “raid.” Add “raid” to the list of words that have been redefined.

The Trump-Hating Leftist Magistrate

We’ve told you a little about local Florida Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, the lower-level judge the FBI found to sign the warrant, notably his sudden jump from the Jeffrey Epstein prosecution to his defense team in 2008. Today, there’s more to tell, including the fact that before he signed this warrant, he’d made his distaste for Trump publicly known. In 2017, he said on Facebook: “[Georgia Congressman] John Lewis is the conscience of America. Donald Trump doesn’t have the moral stature to kiss John Lewis’s feet. Or, as Joseph Welch said to Joseph McCarthy, ‘At long last, have you left no sense of decency?’”

I find it ironic that the people behaving most like Sen. Joseph McCarthy now are the ones Judge Reinhart helped by signing off on that warrant. When it comes to equality under the law and respect for people’s most basic rights, they have no sense of decency at all. And leftists have the nerve to say, ridiculously, that this raid shows “no one is above the law.” What it shows is that the FBI is above the law.

For what it’s worth, Reinhart is also a leftist who enjoys posting “woke” videos such as one on “white privilege.” He sounds like just the sort of Trump-hating judge who would be tickled pink to sign a warrant like that. But he had no business doing it, especially since, as John Solomon reports, a mere six weeks before signing the warrant to raid Trump’s house, he recused himself from Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary and other Democrats over the Trump-Russia Hoax, apparently over the issue of impartiality.

Just for grins, try going to Judge Reinhart’s official bio page.

Ha, “access denied.” But thanks to Jesse Watters for finding a video of Reinhart from 2014 (surprisingly, appearing on Newsmax) defending then-IRS official Lois Lerner for her “lost” emails. “Incompetence doesn’t necessarily lead to criminality,” he said. He blamed the IRS’s “antiquated computer system” to let her off the hook. “Barring some other smoking gun,” he saw nothing criminal. What he said sounds very much like Comey’s “no reasonable prosecutor” speech about Hillary. Think he’d give Trump, or any Trump supporter, a similar benefit of the doubt?

Late-night TV shows celebrated the raid. Stephen Colbert said, “It may be hot outside but, in here, it’s Christmas, because last night, we all got the present we wanted. FBI agents raided Mar-A-Lago! [applause and cheers from audience] That’s the most beautiful sentence America’s ever produced,” he said. He blew the FBI a big smackeroo kiss and laughed gleefully. (More proof that Trump Derangement Syndrome really is a brain-eating disease.)

‘The DOJ Run Amok’

We reported yesterday that Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry was accosted by the FBI while traveling with his family and made to turn over his cell phone. Rep. Perry appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight with guest host Brian Kilmeade, to offer details. He said they wouldn’t tell him how they located him; he also didn’t get to talk with his attorney. The phone he had with him wasn’t his official business phone, but his personal one; they took that.

Later, his attorney was able to talk with someone at the “Justice” Department and was told Perry isn’t a target of the investigation.

Now, think about that, he said. If I’m not a target, why do they come follow me, find me while I’m traveling with my family? They don’t come to my house, they don’t contact my attorney; why did they come and seize my cell phone, to image it, in that fashion? If they would’ve just…contacted my attorney, certainly we would’ve provided the information necessary as required by law, and that would’ve been the end of it. But they want this spectacle, they want this show, they want the intimidation.

He said he thinks all of this activity is linked — that they’re “doing every single thing that they can” to knock Trump out of the running for 2024. He called the National Archives pretext “absurd,” because the President has the ultimate authority to declassify documents. “This is the DOJ run amok.” Perry said to keep this in mind on Friday when Congress meets to (probably) approve a bill that funds 87,000 new IRS agents, who will target “average hard-working Americans who are just trying to make it through their days.”

Charles Gasparino said that “unless they have some wicked smoking gun, this looks like one of the worst abuses of justice that we’ve seen in a long time…I wouldn’t want to be an FBI agent on this call,” he said. Well, maybe some of them will become whistleblowers.

That brought us to John Solomon’s story: “Whistleblowers revealed widespread FBI misconduct ahead of Trump raid.” (Oh, no, he called it a raid!) Read this report on agent Tim Thibault, and you’ll see why any “evidence” the FBI “produces” from Mar-A-Lago should not be believed.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is demanding the DOJ release the order to raid Trump’s home. Though not usually a fan of impeachment, he says that in this case, it must be determined if AG Merrick Garland has used the power of his office for political purposes. And Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is calling on Garland to resign now. “At the very least,” he tweeted, “Garland must resign or be impeached. The search warrant must be published. Christopher Wray must be removed. And the FBI reformed top to bottom.”

And where is Wray? He went to Nebraska for an event, where he did not answer questions about the raid. He did express concern about “dangerous and deplorable” threats against federal agents. We don’t condone such threats, but why does he think they’re receiving them?

A Stain on the Republic

Very early Thursday morning, former naval intel officer and assistant secretary of state (under Colin Powell) Robert Charles told FOX NEWS that “this looks presumptively like a Fourth Amendment violation, right out of a textbook.” He said the raid was “utterly unnecessary,” that there was a subpoena served “about 12 weeks ago” and that Trump had “fully complied,” inviting anyone to his home who wanted to see more.

(Editorial aside: This is consistent with the shocking detail in John Solomon’s must-read report.)

Mr. Charles said his gut tells him that “this is a stain on our republic that will not be forgotten.” He also cited the recusal six weeks previously, saying this judge should not have signed that warrant. “Red lights should have been going off all over the FBI, the Department of ‘Justice,’ the White House,” he said, for mixing politics with justice.

Charles was so eloquent and informative in this segment, we’ll see later today if it’s been posted anywhere and, if so, link to it so you can watch the whole thing.

Finally, Adam Mill at American Greatness asks — and answers — the question that should be on everyone’s mind in “How Do We Get Rid of the FBI?” Highly recommended reading, and fruit for further discussion here.

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN.

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.