FBI raid on Trump’s home ignites political firestorm
Top Republican leaders in the United States flung their support behind former US president Donald Trump this week after an extraordinary 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 advisors 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.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, 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-a-lago after Trump left the White House in January 2021.
Trump has also faced intense legal scrutiny for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and over 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 sow falsehoods that he actually won the 2020 vote.
ALLIES RALLY ROUND
Leading Republicans rallied around the former president, who was not present at Mar-alago 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 “weaponized politicisation.”
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, told NBC that “no person is above the law.”
In his statement, Trump did not give any indication about why the FBI raided his home but said: “They even broke into my safe!”
Andrew Mccabe, a former FBI deputy director, told CNN that agents may have been looking for “something specific” related to the probe into the handling of classified information.
The National Archives said in February that it had recovered 15 boxes of documents from Mara-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 requires Oval Office occupants to preserve records.