At the end of April, Judge Aileen M. Cannon unsealed a number of documents related to the investigation into Donald Trump’s retention of documents marked as classified after he left the White House. Within hours, a new line of rhetoric emerged among the former president’s most fervent supporters: The whole thing had been a frame-up!
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Julie Kelly, a right-wing writer who specializes in plucking sensational-sounding allegations from legal documents, had plucked a sensational-sounding allegation from the mix. The General Services Administration, she claimed, had stored and shipped material to Mar-a-Lago that included the marked documents — a discovery that she suggested indicated that Trump had been framed.
“These are the boxes that ended up containing papers with ‘classified markings,’ ” she claimed on social media.
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But this narrative was not true. The team of folks managing Trump’s transition out of the White House leased space from GSA that expired after six months. At that point, all the material from the transition office was sent to Florida, including to Mar-a-Lago. By September 2021, Trump was in possession of those boxes, months before several boxes were sent back to the National Archives and Records Administration and almost a year before the FBI search that uncovered more than 100 documents marked as classified.
Picking through court files, Kelly also claimed that the famous photo of documents on a carpeted Mar-a-Lago floor was a product of an effort to mislead the public. This, too, was incorrect.
On Tuesday, Judge Cannon unsealed a new tranche of documents in the Florida case being prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith (and being delayed by Cannon). And there was Kelly, picking out details of the FBI’s documents preparing for the search and casting them in a remarkable light: They showed not standard operating procedure but, instead, that federal law enforcement was ready to draw their weapons on the former president.
“Armed FBI agents were preparing to confront Trump and even engage Secret Service if necessary,” she wrote on social media, following a post quoting a filing from legal team in which the FBI’s authorization to use deadly force was noted. “They were going to go door to door to terrorize [Mar-a-Lago] guests and even pick the locks. Gestapo.”
Later she shared a document titled “Policy Statement Use of Deadly Force.”
Even just Kelly’s summation of the “confrontation” is misleading. The linked document notes that, if Trump (the former president of the United States, or FPOTUS) should show up during the search — he was known to be at his home in New Jersey, which was one reason that the search occurred when it did — that staff from the FBI and the special counsel’s office “will be prepared to engage with FPOTUS” and his Secret Service team.
Kelly’s presentation of “engage” here is in the military, engage-the-enemy sense. The obvious interpretation, however, is that the unexpected arrival of the former president was a contingency for which the bureau needed to be prepared (this document is titled “contingencies”) and that the plan was simply for the FBI and special counsel team to deal with it. If, additionally, the Secret Service made the search difficult, the FBI would engage with the Secret Service … “per existing liaison relationships.” This is phone-call engagement, not bang-bang engagement.
In a statement, the FBI noted that it “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force.” That point is important: The deadly-force document shared by Kelly constrains how and when firearms might be used. (Kelly wrote that it showed how the “FBI risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests for a publicity stunt to make it look like Trump stole national security files.”)
Thanks to her repeated willingness to make sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of dire malfeasance to an audience utterly uninterested in the validity of those allegations, Kelly has amassed a large audience on social media. So the “the feds wanted to kill Trump” story quickly took off.
The right-wing blog Federalist wrote a story about it. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) shared Kelly’s allegation, asking if the FBI was “going to shoot SS then Pres Trump, Melania, and Barron too???” When Trump himself posted the allegation on Truth Social, Greene took credit for tipping him off that the “Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”
By Thursday evening, Trump was fundraising off it.
On Fox News, host Jesse Watters — the replacement for former host Tucker Carlson — had no qualms about picking up the story.
“They’re saying Trump’s going to unleash assassination squads on his enemies,” Watters said, “but Biden unleashed armed agents into Trump’s house, authorizing them to use deadly force.” He continued to suggest that the FBI agents conducting the search perhaps wore plain clothes not to reduce the visibility of their hunt for documents but because “maybe they were looking for a little action,” hoping the Secret Service would prompt a confrontation.
Hours later, well after the Kelly-driven narrative had been demonstrated to be unfounded, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo hosted a panel that marveled at President Biden — quickly positioned by Trump supporters as the real driving actor here — “authorizing the FBI, if it came to that and he resisted arrest … to kill Donald Trump,” as she put it.
The idea that opposition to Trump is so fervent among his opponents that they want to see him dead is not new. In a conversation last year, Carlson suggested this possibility to Trump directly. The former president replied that the “savage animals” who were targeting him are “people that are sick.” It’s an appealing bit of rhetoric in that it frames the left as deranged and bloodthirsty and it reinforces a sense of victimization that’s undergirding Trump’s 2024 campaign.
To an objective observer? It is self-evidently ludicrous.
It is a feature of the modern age that people peruse large sets of documents or data and pluck out things that they then misinterpret. Few, however, have Julie Kelly’s combination of audience, devotion to Trump and shamelessness. The result is that her dishonest or incorrect assessments of important issues drive news coverage and spurs the claims made by the former president.
There was another post she offered Tuesday that was not as attention-grabbing. She noted that the new documents again noted the transfer of material to Florida in September 2021.
“[W]ho knows if some of the ‘classified’ docs seized during FBI raid were contained in GSA-packed boxes,” she mused.
And the answer is: She did, back in April — at least according to her initial thread on social media that went viral then.
It’s almost as if her sensational claims don’t hold up over time. Perhaps her allies might be more cautious in elevating them.
Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.
End of carousel
Julie Kelly, a right-wing writer who specializes in plucking sensational-sounding allegations from legal documents, had plucked a sensational-sounding allegation from the mix. The General Services Administration, she claimed, had stored and shipped material to Mar-a-Lago that included the marked documents — a discovery that she suggested indicated that Trump had been framed.
“These are the boxes that ended up containing papers with ‘classified markings,’ ” she claimed on social media.
ADVERTISING
But this narrative was not true. The team of folks managing Trump’s transition out of the White House leased space from GSA that expired after six months. At that point, all the material from the transition office was sent to Florida, including to Mar-a-Lago. By September 2021, Trump was in possession of those boxes, months before several boxes were sent back to the National Archives and Records Administration and almost a year before the FBI search that uncovered more than 100 documents marked as classified.
Picking through court files, Kelly also claimed that the famous photo of documents on a carpeted Mar-a-Lago floor was a product of an effort to mislead the public. This, too, was incorrect.
On Tuesday, Judge Cannon unsealed a new tranche of documents in the Florida case being prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith (and being delayed by Cannon). And there was Kelly, picking out details of the FBI’s documents preparing for the search and casting them in a remarkable light: They showed not standard operating procedure but, instead, that federal law enforcement was ready to draw their weapons on the former president.
“Armed FBI agents were preparing to confront Trump and even engage Secret Service if necessary,” she wrote on social media, following a post quoting a filing from legal team in which the FBI’s authorization to use deadly force was noted. “They were going to go door to door to terrorize [Mar-a-Lago] guests and even pick the locks. Gestapo.”
Later she shared a document titled “Policy Statement Use of Deadly Force.”
Even just Kelly’s summation of the “confrontation” is misleading. The linked document notes that, if Trump (the former president of the United States, or FPOTUS) should show up during the search — he was known to be at his home in New Jersey, which was one reason that the search occurred when it did — that staff from the FBI and the special counsel’s office “will be prepared to engage with FPOTUS” and his Secret Service team.
Kelly’s presentation of “engage” here is in the military, engage-the-enemy sense. The obvious interpretation, however, is that the unexpected arrival of the former president was a contingency for which the bureau needed to be prepared (this document is titled “contingencies”) and that the plan was simply for the FBI and special counsel team to deal with it. If, additionally, the Secret Service made the search difficult, the FBI would engage with the Secret Service … “per existing liaison relationships.” This is phone-call engagement, not bang-bang engagement.
In a statement, the FBI noted that it “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force.” That point is important: The deadly-force document shared by Kelly constrains how and when firearms might be used. (Kelly wrote that it showed how the “FBI risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests for a publicity stunt to make it look like Trump stole national security files.”)
Thanks to her repeated willingness to make sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of dire malfeasance to an audience utterly uninterested in the validity of those allegations, Kelly has amassed a large audience on social media. So the “the feds wanted to kill Trump” story quickly took off.
The right-wing blog Federalist wrote a story about it. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) shared Kelly’s allegation, asking if the FBI was “going to shoot SS then Pres Trump, Melania, and Barron too???” When Trump himself posted the allegation on Truth Social, Greene took credit for tipping him off that the “Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”
By Thursday evening, Trump was fundraising off it.
On Fox News, host Jesse Watters — the replacement for former host Tucker Carlson — had no qualms about picking up the story.
“They’re saying Trump’s going to unleash assassination squads on his enemies,” Watters said, “but Biden unleashed armed agents into Trump’s house, authorizing them to use deadly force.” He continued to suggest that the FBI agents conducting the search perhaps wore plain clothes not to reduce the visibility of their hunt for documents but because “maybe they were looking for a little action,” hoping the Secret Service would prompt a confrontation.
Hours later, well after the Kelly-driven narrative had been demonstrated to be unfounded, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo hosted a panel that marveled at President Biden — quickly positioned by Trump supporters as the real driving actor here — “authorizing the FBI, if it came to that and he resisted arrest … to kill Donald Trump,” as she put it.
The idea that opposition to Trump is so fervent among his opponents that they want to see him dead is not new. In a conversation last year, Carlson suggested this possibility to Trump directly. The former president replied that the “savage animals” who were targeting him are “people that are sick.” It’s an appealing bit of rhetoric in that it frames the left as deranged and bloodthirsty and it reinforces a sense of victimization that’s undergirding Trump’s 2024 campaign.
To an objective observer? It is self-evidently ludicrous.
It is a feature of the modern age that people peruse large sets of documents or data and pluck out things that they then misinterpret. Few, however, have Julie Kelly’s combination of audience, devotion to Trump and shamelessness. The result is that her dishonest or incorrect assessments of important issues drive news coverage and spurs the claims made by the former president.
There was another post she offered Tuesday that was not as attention-grabbing. She noted that the new documents again noted the transfer of material to Florida in September 2021.
“[W]ho knows if some of the ‘classified’ docs seized during FBI raid were contained in GSA-packed boxes,” she mused.
And the answer is: She did, back in April — at least according to her initial thread on social media that went viral then.
It’s almost as if her sensational claims don’t hold up over time. Perhaps her allies might be more cautious in elevating them.
