Jack Thompson
April 24, 2000 4:13 PM

First off, you don't get a search warrant for anything other than inanimate objects. INS Commissioner Doris Meissner was asked on CBS's Face the Nation: "What were you searching for?" At this point, gales of laughter among lawyers had to follow her answer: "The boy."

You get an arrest warrant to seize a person. But Elian is not a criminal, so no arrest warrant would be appropriate either.

When Eric Holder, number two at Justice, was asked by Judge Andrew Napolitano why the government didn't get a court order authorizing the raid, Holder said, not knowing of the trick with the search warrant, "We didn't need an order."

Napolitano, then correctly, pointed out that they sure did, since they asked for one from the 11th Circuit.

So, the government, knowing they couldn't get an order authorizing the forced taking of the boy, went to a lowly magistrate and got a useless search warrant ... useless legally. But useful on Sunday talk shows so that they could falsely but plausibly say they had a "court-ordered search warrant" authorizing the raid.

But Bob Shieffer, in his common sense training, understood that this was not a search; it was the first change of custody in American history without a court order and at the point of a gun.

NewsMax now has the actual "search warrant" issued as a phony pretext for the pre-dawn raid upon Elian's refuge. Upon review, it appears that the Clinton administration acted more unlawfully than even NewsMax suspected.

The warrant, in order to be issued, required Reno's Justice Department to assert that the boy, Elian, was a "concealed person"; that is, that the Justice Department did not know where he was by virtue of his being hidden.

Did not everyone on the planet except Janet Reno know where the boy was? All the media of the modern world were in front of Elian's house because everyone knew he was there! He came out almost every day to play. If he was to be taken, without a court order, which the 11th Circuit refused to give, then he would be taken from that house and that house only.

But "concealed person" is the word required on any search warrant. The Clinton Justice Department used that word in a context defining it as the opposite of its clear meaning in order that the White House spinners would be able to say, dishonestly, that a court approved the raid.

Elian's whereabouts were not concealed. They were know to an absolute certainty. Which is why the search warrant was illegally obtained and void, thereby rendering the taking of the boy — with no legitimate judicial approval — illegal in yet another way, unknown until the search warrant became public.

This is an administration that does not know what "is" is, and uses "concealed" when disclosed would be the right word. Only the truth is here concealed from a naive majority by a president and administration betting heavily on P.T. Barnum's "sucker born every minute" maxim.