Republicans ropeable over Trump FBI raids
WASHINGTON: Top Republican leaders have flung their support behind former US president Donald Trump after the FBI raid on his palatial Florida residence sparked a political firestorm in an already bitterly divided country.
The FBI move marked a stunning escalation of legal probes into the 45th president and comes as he is weighing another White House run.
Several former advisers to the 76-year-old Trump urged him to immediately confirm that he would be a presidential candidate in 2024.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” Trump said of the FBI operation at his Mar-a-lago resort in West Palm Beach. He denounced the FBI raid as a “weaponisation of the Justice System” by “Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.”
At the White House, Press Secretary Karine Jean-pierre said President Joe Biden did not have any advance notice about the raid.
Asked about the potential for civil unrest in reaction to Trump’s legal problems, JeanPierre said “there’s no place for political violence in this country.”
The FBI, which is led by Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, declined to provide a reason for the raid.
But 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-aLago after Trump left the White House in January 2021.
A day after the raid, US Representative Scott Perry – a Trump ally – said FBI agents had confiscated his cell phone, but did not specify why it was taken.
“This morning, while travelling with my family, three FBI agents visited me and seized my cell phone,” Perry told Fox News, condemning “these kinds of banana republic tactics.”
Leading Republicans rallied around the former president, who was not present when the raid took place.
Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence, a potential 2024 rival, expressed “deep concern” and said the raid 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.”