GOP goons follow the Alex Jones playbook when accountability knocks [View all]

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Amanda Marcotte
@AmandaMarcotte
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Trump's statement uses the same playbook as Alex Jones and Steve Bannon: You can't win legally on the facts, so instead you run an outside game to cow authorities and juries into being afraid to go after you.

So how's that working out for them?

salon.com
GOP goons follow the Alex Jones playbook when accountability knocks
Threats and bluster are meant to intimidate authorities and juries into backing down — but no one should be afraid
10:27 AM · Aug 9, 2022

https://www.salon.com/2022/08/09/trump-alex-jones-and-steve-bannon-goons-follow-a-familiar-playbook-when-accountability-knocks/

There's a critical factor to keep in mind regarding the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, the resort hotel Donald Trump resides in Florida: Getting a federal warrant is not child's play.

As former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney Ken White noted in a lengthy Twitter thread following the raid, the "feds do not seek search warrants lightly." As White explained, such warrants generally require "probable cause to believe that the specified location has the specified evidence of a specified federal crime." This one, in particular, would have been combed over by multiple high-ranking authorities, including Attorney General Merrick Garland himself. Crucially, while we the public do not know the details of what is almost certainly one of the most careful and detailed warrants imaginable, Trump himself does, because the subject of the search is given the warrant.

In the lengthy diatribe Trump released Monday night, he failed to mention any of these details. Outside of a vague mention of his "safe," which could very well be a lie like the rest of the statement, Trump didn't utter a single syllable about the specifics of the warrant served on him. He didn't even mention specific allegations to deny them. Instead, his statement was a diarrhea stream of deflections about Watergate and Hillary Clinton, centered around a conspiracy theory that Trump is a victim of "political persecution."

The strategy isn't subtle. Trump is trying to fill the information vacuum left by the FBI's silence with lies. He wants to fill up his followers' minds with paranoid gibberish, so that by the time actual details come out, the facts cannot penetrate their red hats.

*snip*