Former President Donald Trump suggested the FBI may have planted evidence during the bureau’s raid at his Mar-a-Lago home because members of his team were blocked from watching the agents.
In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, the former president wrote that “the FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago.”
“Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.’ Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out?” said Trump.
FBI agents spent about 10 hours scouring his private office on Monday and broke into his safe, according to Trump and members of his family.
About two dozen FBI agents entered the Trump-owned resort at 9 a.m. Monday and left with “a handful of boxes of documents,” Trump spokeswoman Christina Bobb told The Epoch Times. “I didn’t actually get to oversee the search, they wouldn’t let anybody see what they were doing,” she said.
Bobb said she was present when the FBI entered the premises.
FBI agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records,” Bobb said. “I don’t think there was anything of substance.”
Bruce Reinhart, a Florida federal magistrate judge, signed off on a warrant to search the former president’s Florida property.
Background
Reinhart worked as a federal prosecutor until 2008 when he became a defense attorney representing employees of convicted sex trafficker and wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein. Employees included Epstein’s pilots, a scheduler, and others.
The Mar-a-Lago raid warrant was issued on Aug. 5, a day after FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee and was asked about whistleblower reports on whether his agency was becoming increasingly politicized. Wray had to cut the questioning short because he needed to travel, although flight records indicated that he used an FBI jet to travel to a vacation retreat in Upstate New York, according to the New York Post.
The Epoch Times contacted the FBI for comment on Trump’s claims. Neither the bureau nor Attorney General Merrick Garland have offered public comments about the raid, drawing even questions and condemnation from Democrat politicians.
The Department of Justice “must immediately explain the reason for its raid & it must be more than a search for inconsequential archives or it will be viewed as a political tactic and undermine any future credible investigation & legitimacy of January 6 investigations,” wrote former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a longtime critic of Trump, said on Twitter Tuesday.
“DOJ must disclose the bona fide nature of the August 8 action or else the republicans will use it to Discredit the Jan 6 investigation, which would be a terrible disservice to the good work of the house committee in exposing The Trump administration violations,” the former Democrat governor of New York added. Cuomo last year resigned amid allegations he engaged in misconduct with staffers, which Cuomo has categorically denied.
From The Epoch Times