Rabat – Former US President Donald Trump said the FBI raided his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday night, breaking into his safe in an unprecedented search of a former president’s home.
“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice system, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024,” Trump said in a statement.
Eric Trump, a son of the former president, told Fox News that the search concerned boxes of classified documents that Trump took with him to his residence after the end of his term.
The US National Archives and Records Administration previously notified Congress that it recovered around 15 boxes of White House documents from Trump’s home.
After conducting an inventory, the Archives noted that some of the boxes contained documents with “classified national security information.”
Eric Trump told Fox News that his father had been cooperating with the Archives on the matter, with the former president himself describing the process as “ordinary and routine.”
US federal laws require the preservation of memos, letters, mails, faxes, and all other written communication related to a president’s official duties.
Searches of private property cannot be conducted unless relevant law enforcement agencies show that they have sufficient cause for the search, and get approved by a judge.
A search of a former president’s home like this one would have almost certainly also required approval from FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is a Trump appointee, as well as Biden-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland, driving home the significance of the affair.
The raid also comes as Trump continues to reckon with numerous other legal issues, including a probe into his role in the 2021 January 6th Capitol Raid, a wire fraud case, and accusations of election tampering, among others.
