Rabat – The US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) disclosed that it had probable cause to raid former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on possible Espionage Act violations.
The bombshell revelation came after Republican lawmakers and supporters demanded the intelligence agency show tangible evidence for the cause of the raid, leading to the release of the search warrant.
While Trump said before that the records he took were all declassified and securely stored, experts point out that the laws in question make it a crime to mishandle government documents in general, classified or not.
Regardless, the documents the FBI was concerned with seem to have been indeed labeled as classified.
The FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida earlier this week, saying that the former president took with him classified documents from the White House.
The United States’ National Archives had been in contact with Trump for months beforehand, but he failed to return the documents.
US law dictates that when a president leaves office, all documents pertaining to their communication in that position should be stored in the National Archives.
The raid was the first of its kind to happen to a previous president, and prompted outrage from republicans. Trump himself described it as prosecutorial misconduct and a weaponization of the justice system.
Searches of private property cannot be conducted unless approved by a judge, and experts have maintained that the Attorney General and FBI Director would have had to sign off on this specific raid as well.
