176: Chapter 176: Search Warrant Ignites Political Storm

Hollywood Hills, detached villa.

Zhang Yi leaned against the back of the sofa, while the system interface in front of him synchronously played the footage of Prant resting that pair of Levitation Combat Boots on his knees and stroking them repeatedly.

That prop was bought from the system mall for one hundred thousand emotion points.

After Joshua met with Prant, another wave of five to six hundred thousand emotion points came in. Combined with what was left previously, he now held a total of sixteen million in his hands.

But sixteen million was still a far cry from the grand spectacle of a million alien fleets invading Earth that he wanted to set up.

That time above the Hoover Dam, the local skirmish of two hundred thousand fleets and two thousand flying saucers fabricated using heaven-and-earth illusions had burned up quite a few of his emotion points.

Meanwhile, the total amount of emotion points required for the physical scale, hull count, weapon special effects, spatial rifts, and shield interactions of a full-scale invasion by a million fleets was completely on another order of magnitude.

Therefore, the Levitation Combat Boots were a large stone thrown into a calm lake.

Once Prant put them on and stood at a campaign rally, floating lightly thirty meters into the air in front of tens of thousands of people, social media across America and the globe would explode, and his emotion points would naturally rise with the tide.

And when Biden's side was driven into full-scale tension and felt despair by Prant's combination of punches,

he would then manipulate Zhang Long to supplement a wave of hope for Biden's side, harvesting another round.

Repeating this cycle, he would be able to save up all the emotion points he needed before the million fleets officially made their appearance.

At this moment, on another surveillance screen in the corner of the system interface,

over at Mar-a-Lago, the place was already deserted,

and FBI Director Whitfield, along with his squad of agents, fled in panic.

The press conference at the entrance of Mar-a-Lago was temporarily set up by Prant's legal team that evening.

Folding tables, portable microphones, and a navy-blue backdrop printed with the slogan "Save America" were placed directly in front of the main gate.

Beside the backdrop, an American flag directly dismantled from the estate's flagpole and re-ironed was specially erected.

Prant's chief defense lawyer stood in front of the microphones, publicly displaying a copy of the federal court's search warrant, and dismantled the five illegal actions of the FBI's operation item by item:

insufficient basis for the search warrant, search scope exceeding authorization, forcible entry into the former president's private residence without permission, causing damage to private property without discovering any evidence,

and the Department of Justice bypassing conventional procedures to directly issue the search warrant, constituting political interference.

As he spoke, he also held that search warrant directly in front of the camera lens, letting everyone on the social media live broadcast signal see clearly the scribbled "M.W." beside the signature line—Michael Whitfield.

The fermentation speed of the press conference video online far exceeded everyone's expectations.

Mainstream media outlets first split into two camps:

MSNBC ran a prime-time headline reading "FBI Raids Former President's Private Residence, Rule of Law or Witch Hunt",

while Fox News at the same time ran "Prant Legal Team Strikes Back: Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant is Illegal Abuse of Power".

On social media, users supporting Prant flooded the trending lists with screens full of the hashtags "#WitchHunt" and "#Biden'sFBI".

Within twenty-four hours, public opinion pressure was transmitted upward at an irreversible speed.

At the same time, other reporters investigating the issuance process of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant discovered obvious procedural flaws in the authorization chain within the Federal Bureau of Investigation for this operation, and began tracking the source of the problem.

After reporters swarmed to the entrance of the FBI Director's office on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building,

in less than two hours,

the federal Department of Justice announced the launch of an internal investigation into whether Michael Whitfield engaged in abuse of power during the process of applying for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant.

Another forty-eight hours later,

shortly after Attorney General Evan McCarthy finished a brief private report to Biden outside the White House Situation Room,

Michael Whitfield officially stepped down from that large leather chair in the FBI Director's office that he had sat in for many years.

But pushing Whitfield out as a scapegoat could not calm the situation.

Prant's counterattack was launched almost precisely on the same day Whitfield was announced to be suspended.

The bullseye of the first wave was the president's son: Hunter Biden.

The first thing thrown out was the prostitution scandal.

An old video from a few years ago leaked from an anonymous account.

Although the footage was pixelated, the voice was clearly distinguishable; Hunter's voice was cursing viciously at another woman on his phone.

Then came the drug abuse scandal.

A bank transfer record dated over two years ago was enlarged and displayed.

The recipient was a middleman who had been convicted of a felony for drug trafficking and served time in federal prison.

Alongside the transfer table, a detailed list of Hunter purchasing drugs multiple times was listed in parallel.

And then there was the old case of a hit-and-run after driving and hitting someone.

A blurry yet date-verifiable video captured by a convenience store surveillance camera near the scene showed that

in the early morning hours, Hunter's car knocked down a homeless person and drove away directly from the scene without stopping.

Before the public had recovered from this series of scandals,

another blockbuster bomb dropped.

A blonde female model posted a complaint video shot in her apartment on social media, crying so hard that most of her makeup had run.

She said in the video that after hiring her for prostitution, Hunter not only didn't give her a single penny, but also slapped her continuously across the face more than a dozen times, until the corners of her mouth bled.

Previously, she had never dared to speak out for fear of retaliation from the president's son, but now she didn't want to endure it anymore.

Some netizens left angry comments saying that for the president's son to do such a thing completely disgraced the Lighthouse Country.

Other netizens followed up by spamming below: "You hiring a prostitute is one thing, but not paying after hiring her and hitting her as well is a completely different matter."

Some also expressed sympathy, sighing that it took an immense amount of courage for an ordinary woman to dare to stand up against the threats of the entire White House legal team and the Secret Service.

Still others coldly inserted an even more scathing joke in the comments section to mock him.

On the other side, that homeless man who had been knocked down by Hunter's car back then and had never been able to get compensation was also helped onto a hospital bed with the assistance of a charitable legal aid organization.

His entire body was wrapped in bandages, and his eyes slowly moved toward the lens from beneath half-closed eyelids, speaking a passage in an extremely low, slow, and hoarse voice.

He said that he had previously signed non-prosecution agreements many times on medical compensation memos under Hunter Biden's name that had never been made public, because he was afraid at the time that if he didn't sign, he wouldn't even be able to afford the hospitalization fees.

Now, displaying the steel plate pressed against his chest that still hadn't been removed to this day in front of the lens, he coughed and said:

"After he knocked me down, he didn't even flash his brake lights."

As these images spread across the internet, the comment section was almost entirely filled with severe denunciations.

Below the real-time ticker of the news network, that row of constantly switching black-framed subtitles on white backgrounds repeatedly fed all of this into Washington.