164: Chapter 164 Mar-a-Lake Search: A Decisive Move

Biden leaned back in his chair and remained silent for a moment.

After retreating from Zhang Long in the floating city within that sub-space, he had already initiated a comprehensive investigation procedure against Prant.

But procedure is procedure:

A criminal investigation requires a subpoena, a subpoena requires a judge's signature, and a judge's signature requires a sufficiently solid chain of evidence.

And Prant's campaign legal team is one of the best in the world at dragging out procedures until they turn into a quagmire.

He had already used forceful measures to bypass administrative procedures once before when implementing martial law at the Hoover Dam,

but that was because there was a fleet of 200,000 ships hanging in the sky, a threat visible to everyone.

If he were to use the same method to deal with Prant now—directly sending military vehicles to shut down his campaign rallies and throwing him back into the Federal Detention Center—

he wouldn't even need to wait for Prant to strike back; the nation's swing voters would automatically pour all their sympathy votes to Prant, and his own re-election would be hopeless.

He looked up at McCarthy. His tone remained steady, yet it carried the seasoned fatigue of someone whose joints were simultaneously jammed by too many contradictory constraints:

"From the moment Walsh was assassinated until now, everything we've been through hasn't left a single second of redundancy for standard procedures."

"You say we can't delay, and I know we can't."

"But the legally viable paths to conviction currently available are indeed limited."

"Do you have any direct means to bypass Prant's campaign legal team?"

Attorney General Evan McCarthy pressed his hands against the edge of the table and lowered his voice slightly:

"Mr. President, we can start with Mar-a-Lago."

"When Prant left the White House after his previous term ended, he took a large batch of classified documents with him, and these documents are currently stored at Mar-a-Lago in Florida."

"We can absolutely use this as a pretext to have the FBI raid Mar-a-Lago directly and arrest him on charges of illegal possession of federal classified documents."

"Once he's inside... how the procedures proceed will be up to us."

After he finished speaking, Evelyn Strauss placed her shorthand pen beside her notebook and frowned slightly.

Deputy Secretary of State Alan Thompson crossed his arms over his chest, leaned back in his chair, and pressed his lips into a thin line.

Lawrence Graves shook his head silently, but did not immediately speak out in rebuttal.

The high-ranking officials present all knew full well:

For a departing president to take a few boxes of classified documents as private souvenirs had long been an unspoken convention between the two parties in Washington.

Every president, upon leaving office, would take away some memos, private letters, work notes, and copies of some executive orders they had signed from the White House.

Strictly according to the law, these things should all be handed over to the National Archives,

but no one had ever seriously investigated it,

because both sides understood that one day they would also be taking things with them.

If they were to use this as a reason to have the FBI raid Prant's Mar-a-Lago and arrest him now, it would no longer be a legal issue,

but a nuclear-level political event that brought the struggle between the two parties directly out into the open.

McCarthy stood where he was, bracing his arms on the edge of the table, and endured the hesitant gazes cast by everyone as he added:

"I know what you are thinking."

"Partisan struggle."

"Social division."

"Unseemly."

"But what other options do we have now?"

"With standard legal procedures, Prant's legal team has ten thousand ways to drag things out until after Election Day."

"With martial law, the votes will collapse entirely."

"If we do nothing, at his next rally, he will expose everything—the Aliens, the Deep State, and everything we've done for the Longevity Faction—to the whole world."

Biden tilted his head back slightly against the chair, chin upward. After several seconds of silence, he withdrew his gaze. His tone was calm and decisive, as if he had already brushed aside all the paradoxical options, leaving only this narrow door through which they could pass:

"Have the FBI raid Prant's Mar-a-Lago in Florida and arrest him on charges of illegal possession of federal classified documents."

He then added, "The key to everything right now lies in the technological assistance from the Longevity Faction."

"The Deep State possesses the true power capable of crushing the fleet of Grey Alien. As long as we can obtain their assistance by locking the door to Earth, we can rewrite the power dynamics of the entire nation before the technological gap closes completely."

"Obtaining technology at that level is enough to replace all the old power structures built on oil, finance, and defense contracts!"

"No matter how much social division occurs in the process, in the face of an absolute, crushing technological gap, everything can be smoothed over afterward!"

"But the prerequisite is this: complete the mission assigned to us by Lord Zhang Long!"

"Therefore, searching Mar-a-Lago brooks no delay!"

"We cannot drag this out any longer!"

McCarthy slowly sat back in his chair, his hands gripping the armrests tightly.

Evelyn Strauss turned her shorthand notebook to a blank page and picked up her pen again.

Anna Hodgson pushed aside the national debt liquidity warning report she had been pressing against the corner of the table.

Others still had their mouths open, seemingly wanting to raise some remaining, comprehensive concerns at the administrative and political levels,

but upon thinking of Solomon Crane's head, now blown to ashes, and those mission nodes that could never be recovered a second time, they ultimately just closed their mouths, swallowing whatever they wanted to say.

Solomon's matter had already been botched; they could not botch Prant's as well.

Any weak link in this room could not afford to open up any more cracks in this matter.

...

New York, Manhattan, Rockefeller Family private archives.

This archive was located on the top floor of Rockefeller Center. All four walls were lined with electromagnetic shielding copper mesh, and outside the window was the skyline of Midtown Manhattan.

The long walnut conference table was covered with archive files transported from the basement of the Crane Family estate,

each packed in a translucent sealed archive bag, arranged in chronological order.

Rockefeller III sat at the head of the conference table, with Samuel Astor, Isabelle DuPont, Jacob Rothschild, and William Vanderbilt V seated on either side, everyone's expression extremely focused.

Fourth Prince Dao Dun had already been secretly transferred out of the estate basement and settled in a private sanatorium on Long Island,

and all the documents, research records, and archival materials in the Crane Family basement that could not be destroyed in time had been emptied out by The Five Great Families and transported back to New York.

At this moment, three people were standing before the conference table giving a report.

Sitting at the middle section of the long table, near the side of the projection screen, was Soren Holmstrom,

the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Rockefeller Family, sixty-seven years old, a Swedish-American astrophysicist,

who had served as the Director of Theoretical Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and was poached from academia fifteen years ago by the Rockefeller Family with an offer he couldn't refuse.

Sitting next to him was Elena Chen, forty-eight, a Chinese-American PhD in Bioinformatics who had led the final data analysis team for the Human Genome Project and had completed the preliminary classification of all biological samples on-site in the Crane Family estate basement.