We gave our opinion Aug. 12 that constitutionality is in question when raiding anyone’s home with dozens of FBI agents, including the home of former President Donald Trump.
If you are going to send agents into someone’s home, root through their personal items and generally violate their personal space, you better have a good reason to do so.
The release of the affidavits last week with massive redactions on them was not exactly what the public was looking for.
The agents raided Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., armed with a search warrant and looking for secret documents that may have been improperly removed from government custody.
Granted, if those documents were meant to be classified in the first place, it would defeat the purpose of the investigation to just go ahead and release those. That is understandable.
But redaction in general is a practice used too often and haphazardly by the government to keep us out of their business, which really is our business.
The FBI, GBI and other agencies have used the phrase “open investigation” for many years in many capacities to redact and hide information from the public. They can seemingly keep investigations “open” for as long as necessary.
Even when investigations are complete, some of those agencies have been reluctant to turn over the findings. But why not? We paid for those agents to do the investigation. We paid for the paper they are printed on. We paid for the gas in the SUVs and the bullets in the guns.
The government is ours, and they work for us.
Our government still has a certain amount of responsibility to the people for its actions. Don’t on the one hand tell us that the former president has violated the Constitution, then make us question whether his Fourth Amendment rights are being granted.
In the end, there are some things that we do not need to know. We do not need personal information about anyone that can compromise their own secure identity, and we do not need to know the names of protected witnesses. But the reasons for a search and seizure and the charges against anyone need to be known.
Everyone deserves attorney-client privilege, but if the government is going to make a case against a citizen, let them make that case in open court and in front of the public.
The FBI has had its day to go in and take out what they obviously knew they were looking for in the first place. If there are charges to be made, levy them. If there are not, tell us that too and explain why it warranted action at all.