Let us consider some alternative versions of what happened behind the scenes in the FBI and DOJ prior to and leading up to the execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Which version is the most likely or most plausible?
Version 1--the Bumbling Idiocy Version:
“Let’s find a judge who’ll sign off on a legally unjustified,
politically-motivated fishing expedition--um, that is, search warrant--against an ex-President! With a
nefarious scheme of this scale and with this many people involved, there’s no
way the legal fishiness of our rationale will be exposed! It’s not like Trump
will start screaming bloody murder and riling up a base that’s already shown
they’ll storm the Capitol for him, and it’s certainly not like the Republicans
in Congress would paint it as politically motivated misuse of power in a bid to
win votes. Nothing to lose and everything to gain! Now which judge will look at
a bunch of piss-poor evidence and call it good enough for a search warrant
against an ex-President—and won’t worry about his unjustified decision being
put under the microscope?”
Version 2--the Reticent Dutifulness Version:
“Holy $#!*. We’re talking about executing a search warrant
on an ex-President. Half the country is going to scream that it’s political,
and Republican politicians will encourage that! The credibility of the FBI and
DOJ will be the immediate topic of national conversation. Are we absolutely sure
our professional duty and the evidence before us demands that we do this?
Because it's going to be a $#!*-storm. Okay, okay. So if we’re going to do
this, we’ve got to be absolutely sure that our case is ten times stronger than
would be sufficient for executing such a search in any other case, that
everything is so by-the-book, with such an air-tight legal justification & such
impeccable documentation, that we can answer every challenge that is going to
be raised. Because even then, a third of the country is going to believe that
we did this as an unjustified political attack rather than as an effort to
ensure no one is above the law.”
Which version is more plausible, given that we are talking about both the FBI and the DOJ, organizations filled with career public servants of varying political allegiances, many of them very smart, at least some of them very principled, and all of them surely operating with the understanding that this action will put them under the microscope in an unprecedented way?
Maybe it's a third alternative. Maybe, rather than bumbling idiocy (version 1) or reticent dutifulness (version 2), you think the behind-the-scenes-story is a conspiracy.
Version 3--the Superhuman Conspiracy Version:
"We, the Deep State, are a highly secretive and hidden cabal within the US that actually pulls the strings of national and global events without public knowledge. We have agents everywhere who are absolutely loyal. And our reach extends into every dimension of public life. We've achieved all this without anyone giving us away, and we will draw on these superhuman resources to fabricate a legal justification for the search of an ex-President's home and offices, one so meticulous and carefully constructed that there is no way it will fall apart in the light of even unprecedented public scrutiny. And just to be safe, we will have Judge X sign off on the warrant, since we have such damning dirt on him that he'll sign it no matter what. And we have dirt on every journalist who might be inclined to investigate Judge X and his decision! Not that we'll need to use that dirt, because all the journalists are in our pocket except Alex Jones, and we've managed to shut him down with that lawsuit. We're that powerful! Bwahahaha!"
Conspiracies happen. They do. But they depend for their success on secrecy. Such secrecy is maintained by staying under the radar as much as possible and by having as few people as possible aware of what is going on. The kind of raid we're talking about is exactly the sort of thing conspirators would want to avoid: the scale if it and the resultant massive scrutiny are the greatest enemies of the secrecy on which conspiracies depend.
The idea that the conspirators are so powerful that they don't need to worry about threats to secrecy--that's what, inspired by philosopher Brian Keeley, I'd be inclined to identify as one defining hallmark of a "conspiracy theory." In a conspiracy theory, we begin with a story that explains events in terms of the operation of a group of hidden conspirators--but as objections to this story are raised, the objections are handled by increasing the size and reach of the conspirators. The judicial branch approved it because they're in on it! Your objection is based on information provided by the news media, but they're part of it, too! Eventually, the conspiracy reaches a size and level of power and unity of purpose--and continued secrecy--essentially impossible to reconcile with the messy realities of fallible human enterprises.
(In addition to the above, in his seminal philosophical work on conspiracy theories Brian Keeley focuses special attention on another dimension of conspiracy theories: in order to be sustained, they require adopting a kind of global skepticism about our ordinary sources of public knowledge. I find this a rich source of reflection about the dynamics of conspiracy theories.)
Superhuman conspiracies have been popularized in films and TV shows and novels--and they make for great fiction. But in real-world conspiracies, there is a real possibility of exposure, increasing as more people are involved and more public scrutiny is directed at the events the conspirators are involved with. And this means that conspirators don't tend to work through such things as highly-publicized officially-sanctioned raids that are guaranteed, by virtue of the political climate, to inspire many powerful politicians to demand and bring about unprecedented levels of scrutiny.
In short, a realistic formulation of the conspiracy version of the story folds into the bumbling idiocy version (version 1).
One more thought: Someone might think that the "reticent dutifulness" version (version 2) is too idealistic about public servants working in agencies like the FBI and the DOJ. But here's the thing. It might be too idealistic to assume that the people working at these agencies are so overwhelmingly guided by a sense of principle and duty that it would be impossible to pull off a less-than-above-board search. It is not too idealistic to assume that most people want to be seen as good people, and most people don't want to be caught in the act of doing something unsavory--and on those grounds posit that when they know they are going to be subjected to intense public scrutiny--as they will when they are involved in ordering a search of the property of an ex-President--they try to be as professional and above-board as possible.
That's just a basic inference about the way people generally are. Given that fact, and the competence and intelligence of so many who work in these agencies--along with the fact that many of them are professional and principled human beings who take the rule of law seriously and come from a diversity of political persuasions--it seems to me that the reticent dutifulness version of the story is considerably more plausible than the bumbling idiocy version.
But if the bumbling idiocy version is true, that should become apparent in the days and weeks to come (unless, of course, there is a superhuman conspiracy working to systematically silence all evidence of bumbling idiocy--and doing it so successfully that the truth is only known to that one guy who posts earnest YouTube videos about these conspiracies from inside his car, referencing unnamed sources that are "really high up" and have entrusted their secrets to him).
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