The Trump Mar-a-Lago lethal force claim is just stupid. But it's par for the course

All search warrants involve the possibility of forced entry. All of them involve police seizures of property, which can subject the personnel involved to legal as well as safety risks.

It would have been surprising if the Mar-a-Lago search hadn’t been conducted in accordance with an operational plan of which use-of-force policies were a component. It was important to do this search by the book. Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. Follow him on Twitter @andrewcmccarthy

A search warrant is not a day at the circus (something I can’t say about days spent at the trial). Most are executed without incident; many are not. All of them involve a probable-cause finding that incriminating evidence will be recovered on the premises — which usually are associated with people suspected of crimes. Many of those crimes, though by no means all of them, are violent. Virtually all of them involve situations in which law-enforcement officials have concluded that if evidence is not seized, it might be destroyed or manipulated (in cases of nonviolent crimes involving generally law-abiding people who exhibit cooperation with police and prosecutors, the government usually secures evidence by means less intrusive than a compulsory search).