May 23, 2024 09:50 AM UTC

Boebert Follows MTG Down Trump Assassination Rabbit Hole (UPDATED)

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• by: Colorado Pols

THURSDAY UPDATE: Oh, look! President Biden also attempted to kill…President Biden? This comes via a White House Correspondent for Fox News, no less:

Perhaps now we can turn our attention to the next stupid thing from MAGAland.

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UPDATE: The ex-President leans in to the newest Big Lie:

This feels like a very, very bad thing to deceive people about.

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Yesterday, America’s most ultra-MAGA of them all Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene went absolutely bonkers with a theory–asserted like everything else MTG theorizes as stone-cold fact–that the Biden administration was not only “planning to assassinate [ex-President Donald] Trump,” but actually “gave the green light” for doing so when Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound was raided in the 2022 search for classified documents Trump absconded with leading to criminal charges:

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona made a similar accusation, again without any important qualifiers like “allegedly” or “possibly” or even the benefit of a question mark:

Which at least MTG’s feuding other half of the “Q-some Twosome,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, managed in her own breathless post a few hours later:

But if any of these members of Congress had taken a moment to contact either the Department of Justice or anyone with a federal law enforcement background, they could have had their concerns allayed in about two sentences. As reported by the Phil Anschutz-owned Washington Examiner:

On Tuesday, the FBI released a statement saying its language authorizing deadly force was standard protocol.

“The FBI 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,” the agency said. “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

As it turns out, the language in the search warrant of Mar-a-Lago supposedly authorizing “deadly force” was entirely boilerplate and would apply in any felony federal warrant. There’s absolutely nothing in this routine language in a search warrant executed by sworn federal law enforcement to suggest a plot to assassinate Donald Trump.

Especially since, as MTG, Boebert, and Gosar forgot to mention:

The operations order further shows how agents were well aware Trump would not be present at the property during the search, as it was carried out during Mar-a-Lago’s off-season when Trump normally resides at his property in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Trump was a thousand miles away. The warrant was executed when authorities knew Trump would not be on the premises.

The real problem here, of course, is that Trump is very unhappy to be on the wrong side of the criminal justice system. Rep. Boebert, herself no stranger to the criminal justice system, should at least be able to understand that felony search warrants are by definition backed up with the threat of force.

There was a time when even the fringes of the debate were more careful. This is not a conversation any responsible person should invite.