Sometimes, one can learn a lot from a Freedom of Information Act request that comes up empty. Take this new NBC News report, for example:
The FBI has said it can find no records related to former President Donald Trump’s assertions in November that he “sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys” to stop “ballot theft” in Florida during the 2018 election. In a letter dated March 6 and received this week by NBC News, the FBI wrote that it had searched its Central Records System but was “unable to identify records” in response to a reporter’s Freedom of Information Act request seeking any records related to Trump’s claims.
I have a hunch most normal people won’t remember what led to this FOIA request, so let’s take a brief stroll down memory lane and revisit our coverage from last fall.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis cruised to an easy re-election victory in the 2022 elections, and soon after, much of the political world started speculating about the Republican governor’s likely presidential campaign. It was around this same time when Trump, annoyed that an understudy might interfere with his ambitions, started taking not-so-subtle rhetorical shots at the Floridian.
But that’s not all the former president did. He also tried to argue that DeSantis would’ve lost in 2018 were it not for Trump’s post-election intervention.
“[A]fter the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win,” he claimed by way of his social media platform. “I stopped his Election from being stolen.”
In other words, according to the former president, he learned of a secret scheme being hatched by corrupt election officials he failed to identify, which led him to secretly deploy FBI agents and federal prosecutors to…
Read the full article here
