From sea to seaThe mansion owned by Donald Trump in Palm Beach, southeast Florida, was searched by FBI agents this Monday, the former president himself said.
“These are dark times for our nation as my beautiful home in Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach is now under siege, raid and occupation by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump (2017-2021) wrote in a statement.
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The Republican declared, “Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States.”
Why did the FBI search Donald Trump’s mansion?
The FBI would search for official documents at the Florida residence of former US President Donald Trump (2017-2021), according to the New York Times, which cited sources close to the investigation.
According to the Times version – one of the most critical newspapers towards the former president – these documents would contain, among other things, classified material that Trump would have taken from the White House instead of turning it over to the historical archive required by law.
A general view of Donald Trump’s resort town of Mar-a-Lago is shown in this file photo taken on December 24, 2017. Photo: AFP
The Times information is signed by Maggie Haberman, the same editor who wrote a book that publishes photos showing notes that Trump allegedly flushed down the toilet when he was president.
The images are part of the book Confidence man: the making of Donald Trump and the breaking of America and were obtained by the author thanks to sources in the former Republican government.
One of these images shows a restroom in the White House and the second another from a Trump trip abroad. One of the torn notes reads “qualified” and another reads “Stefanik,” a possible reference to Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Trump ally who became the party’s “Number Three” in the House of Representatives. Short.
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It’s not clear who wrote them, but according to CNN, their handwriting appears to be that of the former president.
“Who knows what those papers were? Just him and allegedly the one who dealt with it,” Haberman told CNN on Monday, clarifying that the most important thing about the matter beyond the descriptive content is the preservation of official documents.
The reporter recalls that during Trump’s administration (2017-2021), White House officials pointed out that the now-former US President used to flush documents down the toilet.
This isn’t the first time Trump has been accused of tearing up official documents. In February, the media reported the discovery of several boxes of supplies and employment information that the former president had at his Florida home.
Among the documents were correspondence sent to him by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during the bilateral thaw, which Trump once described as “love letters,” and a letter left for him in the Oval Office by his predecessor Barack Obama. 2009-2017).
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Haberman had previously asserted in February that Trump used to flush paper down the toilet and that White House officials said it sometimes clogged the pipes, an accusation the former president considered “categorically false” at the time.
“You have to be pretty desperate to sell books when part of your promotional strategy is photos of papers in a cup,” Trump spokeswoman Taylor Budowich told Axios Monday.
Is Donald Trump under investigation?
The raid does not necessarily mean that Trump is under investigation for a crime.
The documents sought could be needed for other investigations involving members of his administration, including the probe into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Congress by hundreds of Trump supporters.
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But the nature of the raid, analysts say, points to something far more important.
Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the FBI, told CNN he found it “really inconceivable” that it was simply a matter of retrieving documents from the national archives. “You must have a lot more than that,” he said.