Now to CLARIFY and make it EXTRA CLEAR about a mini-controversial editorial decision to certain folks in the audience: A number of subpoenas and search warrants were served by FBI agents to Trump minions last week over their failed coup attempt – and here’s an opportunity to add Trump 2020 Campaign manager Bill Stepien and CFO Sean Dollman to that list, per CNN. The first word of which we got on Friday, September 9th from Steve Bannon ranting on his bullshit show saying that at least 35 “senior MAGA Republicans, allies of Donald Trump” were “raided” by the FBI the previous day. We believed that the claim was suspect but almost certainly had some kernel of truth to it, though we admittedly did understate our skepticism in the writing.

Now today, with reports that as many as 40 Trump minions (and related entities, e.g. Women for Trump aka Women for America First) were served subpoenas, with at least two of them having their phones seized by FBI agents. We (really just “me,” as in Spartan) did not mean to use the word “raids” to directly describe these not very friendly visits from FBI agents to Trump minions, but merely to say kind of “Haha, fuck you skeptics, we were right to pick up Bannon’s claim and treat it as probably based in truth,” because something happened even if it fell short of an FBI raid or raids.

We did not on Friday or Monday think literally 35 houses had been torn apart by FBI agents and we certainly should have done better to make that belief as clear as possible. However it’s not unprecedented in this investigation either (and smart money says it happened again last week and we just don’t know about it yet). This all to say, get over it, imprecise language was used, happy to explain why, though not really feeling an apology is necessary here given the skepticism the first report was met with Friday. The difference between “raid” and a subpoena is not nothing, but it sure as fuck is a lot smaller than the difference between a subpoena and nothing at all.