For the law to finally catch up with Donald Trump to a greater extent than before is certainly a welcome development for many.
This Sunday morning, the campaign of Florida attorney Daniel Uhlfelder for state Attorney General flew a plane over Trump’s southern Florida property Mar-a-Lago that read, in part, “Trump for Prison.” (It also said “Uhlfelder for AG.”) The banner, of course, hearkens back to recent — and ongoing — FBI action essentially implicating the former president, who saw Mar-a-Lago searched by FBI agents this month. That raid was connected to a government probe into the handling of highly sensitive documents from the Trump administration, and some of the most protected information in the U.S. government was recovered from Donald’s resort. Trump also faces other potential legal vulnerabilities connected to his attempts to undercut the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Check out an image of the banner flown over Mar-a-Lago below:
Notably, this instance isn’t the first time somebody flew a banner over Mar-a-Lago mocking Trump in the wake of the FBI raid. A southern Florida man named Thomas Kennedy and a group of friends paid $1,800 for a banner reading “Ha Ha Ha” to fly over Mar-a-Lago. (“Ha” was repeated on the banner beyond just the three-part expression.) The banner was evidently in the air for some three hours on August 10. “It brought me a lot of joy to do so,” Kennedy remarked of launching the display. “I would do it again.” Three particular pieces of federal law were cited in a list of potential criminal violations in warrant materials associated with the Mar-a-Lago search. One of the cited measures is the Espionage Act, which broadly covers national security-related issues, and another targets document meddling for the purpose of obstruction. The latter statute evidently carries up to 20 years if found guilty.
Trump and those close to him are, of course, freaking out, consistently seeking to cast the raid in intensely dramatic, existential terms. There remains no evidence that political motivations actually drove the search or are driving the underlying investigation. Documents were really, actually at the property, and claims Trump was overwhelmingly forthcoming just aren’t true. In one example, a signed June statement from one of the former president’s lawyers claimed all the documents marked classified from a particular storage area were returned to authorities. In the subsequent raid, FBI agents discovered nearly a dozen sets of classified documents, alongside other materials taken in the operation — suggesting the signed statement lied.
