Nomination For a Hero Badge
Breitbart breathlessly announces that the FBI was authorized to use “deadly force” during the Mar-A-Lago raid. No shit. I’m not a fan of the FBI (Fuckin Bunch of Idiots). Including a reiteration of the agency use of force policy is not a fuck-up. Everything else the FBI did in conducting the raid was, however.
I have participated in over a 1000 search warrants. It went without saying that anybody that attempted to use deadly force against me and mine would likely not survive the event. I didn’t need a mother-may-I on a raid plan.
The first I heard of this, was that the “deadly force” endorsement was included in the search warrant affidavit. It wasn’t. The “deadly force” statement was included in the operations order. What we narcs referred to as the raid plan. Raid plan is macho, so the term was changed to operations order. In my experience, such a use of force statement was included in every operations order produced by the Feds. The language became known as “boiler plate”. The statement was included in every operations plan whether it was needed or not. Let me back up a bit.
First, my experience was mostly with DEA and ATF running a close second. Typically, these operations targeted multiple locations and involved officers from multiple agencies, Federal, State and Local. Each agency had their own use of force policy. These policies didn’t necessarily jive in all particulars. So, a statement of which use of force policy ruled served to level the playing field. Think back to when you were a kid playing sandlot games. The kid that owned the ball, got to make the rules.
Having such a statement in an operations plan satisfied the bureaucrats. Not having such a statement was cause to abandon the whole project. Checkboxes, don’t you know. It became a necessary feature of raid plans because everybody on the sharp end of the stick knew when a raid team “stacked”, no bureaucrats would be anywhere in sight.
Feds are good at boiler plate. Boiler plate is not only found in paperwork. It carries over into how particular tasks are performed. The Feds have invested a lot of money into tactical operations, there are nifty uniforms, ballistic vests, automatic weapons, armored vehicles, mobile command posts, black helicopters and media relations people. I suspect that nobody noticed the C-130 gunship circling overhead because they were distracted by the clown show happening on the ground. Feds know one thing, use it or lose it. Known in the civilian world as, “when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.”
Any FBI agent who didn’t avail himself of all resources available to him is not a team player. The reality is that two agents and three gofers could have executed the Mar-A-Lago search warrant and obtained the same information. Had that occurred, the SWAT team, armored vehicle drivers, helicopter pilots and media specialist would have had nothing to do.
Ask yourself. Who was the potential opposition? Answer the Secret Service, another federal law enforcement agency. Granted, the FBI is not on any other agencies Christmas card list, but pitched gun battle? Now we find out that the FBI with the connivance of the United States Attorney tampered with the evidence that they collected. Somebody ought to take another look at that operations order to see if that activity was authorized.
