Former United States President Donald Trump has protested against his probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The investigation which led to a raid on Trump’s palatial Florida residence on
Monday marked a stunning escalation of legal probes into the 45th US President, drawing cheers from his political foes and condemnation from his allies.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” the 76-year-old Trump said of the day-long FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort.
He denounced the FBI raid as “weaponisation of the Justice System” by “Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.”
The FBI declined to provide a reason for the unprecedented move against a former chief executive.
But multiple US media outlets said agents were conducting a court-authorised search related to the potential mishandling of classified documents that had been sent to Mar-a-Lago after Trump left the White House in January 2021.
Trump has also been facing intense legal scrutiny for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 elections and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.
Since leaving office, Trump has remained the country’s most divisive figure, continuing to claim that he actually won the 2020 vote.
Leading Republicans rallied around the former President, who was not present at Mar-a-Lago when the raid took place.
Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, a potential 2024 rival, expressed “deep concern” over the search of Trump’s home and said it smacked of “partisanship” by the Justice Department.
Kevin McCarthy, who is seeking to become speaker of the House of Representatives if Republicans win November’s midterm elections, accused the Justice Department of “weaponised politicisation.”
Republican Party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called the raid “outrageous.”
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, said, “launching an investigation of a former President this close to an election is beyond problematic.”
Trump’s former social media manager, Dan Scavino, urged him to accelerate an announcement that he would run again.
“No person is above the law,” the Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, told the NBC News. “Not even a former President of the United States.”
A Democrat from Connecticut, Senator Chris Murphy, said, “once we decide that the rich and powerful are above the law, we stop being America.”
In his statement, Trump did not give any indication about why the FBI raided his home but said, “They even broke into my safe!”
A former FBI deputy director, Andrew McCabe, said he believed agents may have been looking for “something specific” related to its probe into the handling of classified information.
The National Archives said in February that it had recovered 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago and asked the Justice Department to look into Trump’s handling of classified material.
The recovery of the boxes raised questions about Trump’s adherence to presidential records laws enacted after the 1970s Watergate scandal that require Oval Office occupants to preserve records.
Speaking on the CNN, McCabe said, “there had to be a suspicion, a concern and indeed specific information that led (the FBI) to believe that there were additional materials that were not turned over.”
AFP
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