The FBI ransacked former US President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence over top secret documents he might have taken with him when he left the White House. This is reported by The Washington Post and The New York Times , citing sources.
WP notes that a search of the former president's property requires approval at the highest level – the Department of Justice.
The US National Archives has been asking for the return of 15 boxes of documents over the course of many months and has approached the FBI over the threat of their destruction. The archive referred to the fact that Trump destroyed official papers intended for storage in government archives during his term in office.
Trump was not warned about the search, sources said. The FBI's actions are related to the upcoming elections in 2024, the ex-president believes.
"These are truly dark times for our nation as my beautiful home at the Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach is currently under siege by the FBI, who are searching it."
The Mar-a-Lago residence is now closed, Trump advisers said he was not there during the search, which took place on Monday, August 8. According to a source with knowledge of Trump's whereabouts, the politician was in New York that day.
This is not the first investigation against Trump. In June, open hearings began in the United States on the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a special committee of Congress examined whether Trump's actions could have influenced the storming and riots. The committee concluded that Trump was trying to falsify the results of the elections, and then achieve the cancellation of the recognition of their results, which provoked riots at the Capitol and its capture. Trump also manipulated the crowd of his supporters with the help of Twitter and accused his vice president Mike Pence of not wanting to cancel the election results.
In early 2017, a dossier on Trump was published, authored by former British intelligence officer MI6 Christopher Steele. The dossier formed the basis of Robert Mueller's prosecutorial investigation into Trump's ties to Russia and Moscow's interference in US elections. The document said that Russian intelligence agencies helped the Republican win the 2016 election, and Russia has a sex tape made in a Moscow hotel in 2013, which confirms Trump's connection with a prostitute. During the investigation, some of the data provided by Steele was refuted, and the CIA had questions about the sources of information of the former spy.
Trump himself called all the given data fake and denied any contacts with Moscow. Russia has also strongly denied its interference in the American elections. However, the Mueller investigation led to a criminal case against the head of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort, who was also suspected of having links with the Kremlin, and some other Trump associates. In 2018, Manafort was sentenced to more than seven years in prison, but Trump pardoned him in 2020.