Biden Ally Torches Incredible CNN Scoop That FBI Gets Search Warrants When People Don’t Cooperate: ‘Ridiculous…Clickbait’

An ally of President Joe Biden is torching CNN’s amazing scoop that the Justice Department gets search warrants when people don’t cooperate with searches, calling it “ridiculous” and “clickbait.”

It took a CNN reporting team of Paula Reid, Pamela Brown, Evan Perez, and Jessica Schneider to break the stupendous “news” that, as the headline states, “Justice Department was prepared to seek warrant had Biden not consented to home search, sources say.”

On Wednesday’s edition of CNN’s The Situation Room, Reid went on the air to break the big scoop:

BLITZER: Tonight, sources are telling CNN that the FBI’s unprecedented search of President Biden’s Delaware home followed very high-stakes talks between the Justice Department and Biden’s attorney and the department was prepared to seek a search warrant.

CNN Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent Paula Reid is on the story for us right now. Paula, first of all, what are you learning about the high-stakes discussions between the U.S. Justice Department and Biden’s attorneys?

PAULA REID, CNN SENIOR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, as you noted, this was unprecedented, the FBI searching the home of a sitting president. The Biden’s team has stressed that they’re cooperating, they wanted this search to happen, but we’ve learned the federal investigators also were prepared to seek a warrant if they did not get consent to search the Wilmington property.

Now, the Justice Department never had to raise that possibility in these discussions because they came to an agreement about how the FBI would be allowed to search the house. They were given access and allowed to search the entire premises.

But, look, the Justice Department is aware, they need to treat this case the same way they treated the Trump probe. The facts of these cases at this point, they are very different, but as we heard the attorney general say on Monday, they will treat everyone equally.

There are a multitude of problems with this report, not the least of which is — DUH? What were the sources, Every Employee Handbook Ever Given To Justice Department Employees On Their First Day?

When I first saw Jake Tapper tweet the story, I had to do a double-take, because I figured there HAD to be more to it than that. Here’s my reaction to the tweet:

This is the world’s dumbest fucking “scoop.” It’s just a statement of the obvious based on an irrelevant hypothetical. The story even states A warrant was never discussed.

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This is like saying SCOOP! Justice department was prepared to cut Joe Biden down in a hail of bullets if he opened fire on FBI agents

But there isn’t anything more than that. The article itself notes that no, a warrant was never considered or discussed, and no raid was ever considered because — well, here’s how CNN put it, which is another big problem (bullets and emphasis are mine):

• Federal investigators also were prepared to seek a warrant if they did not get consent to search the Wilmington property, according to multiple sources.
• The Justice Department, however, never raised the possibility of a warrant during the recent discussions, according to a law enforcement source, even though the possibility loomed if Biden’s team didn’t cooperate.
• In the end, both sides reached an agreement that allowed the FBI to do the search, and investigators spent nearly 13 hours combing through all of the working, living and storage spaces.

What this entire report scrupulously avoids saying — even though it has been widely reported and acknowledged by multiple named sources who are actually parties to the search — is that Biden and his team didn’t just cooperate, the search was their fucking idea! They “reached an agreement” — to do the search that Biden’s team invited them to do!

Failure to mention that goes beyond incomplete, beyond misleading, and into malpractice.

When reached for comment, one Biden ally told me “it’s pretty ridiculous that they are reporting out non-existent hypotheticals that their own reporting admit never even were suggested – all in service of a clickbait headline and chyron.”

That’s putting it mildly. It’s not the worst, most disgraceful example of the media going out of their way to concoct Biden’s complete cooperation with a relatively minor case into a Trump-sized crime of the century, but it has got to be the dumbest.

But even in the dumbest story, there is something to be learned. Somebody fed CNN this story for a reason, and probably some very dumb editor decided to dress up the most mundane part of the story in order to get some clicks out of it, and the reporters wrote it up to make it sound as “interesting” as they could by making it sound like Biden was an orange hair away from getting raided like Trump.

As near as I can tell, the true purpose of this story, at least from the “law enforcement sources” who fed it to CNN, is embedded in the middle of the story: “The Justice Department is keen to avoid any perception that it is treating the Biden documents case differently than the Trump Mar-a-Lago investigation. The search on Friday removes one glaring difference that Trump’s supporters had pointed to: that only Trump’s property was searched by law enforcement.”

Apparently, CNN is also “keen to avoid any perception that it is treating the Biden documents case differently than the Trump Mar-a-Lago investigation,” no matter what they have to spin up, or leave out.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.