Former US president Donald Trump called the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents who raided his Mar-a-Lago estate ‘common criminals’ hours after his passports were returned to him. The Justice Department returned the former president’s passports.
Trump earlier said that the FBI during the search last week seized three passports (one among them expired) along with other documents.
“The DOJ and FBI just returned my passports. Thank you! Unfortunately, when they Raided my home, Mar-a-Lago, 8 days ago, they just opened their arms and grabbed everything in sight, much as a common criminal would do . This shouldn’t happen in America,” Trump posted on Truth Social – the social media site he owns.
The FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home after receiving a search warrant to recover classified records and documents that were labelled ‘top secret’ and ‘classified’. Those documents were labelled ‘TS/SCI’ as per US government’s standards.
Soon after the raids were over, Trump posted: “Wow. In the raid by the FBI on Mar-a-Lago, they stole my three Passports (one expired), along with everything else. This is an assault on a political opponent at a level never before seen in our country. Third World.”
“I think it goes to show how aggressive they were, how overreaching they were, that they were willing to go past the four corners of the warrant and take whatever they felt was appropriate or they felt that they could take,” Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb said.
The US National Archives and Records Administration or NARA alleged earlier that Trump was in possession of 15 boxes of White House documents, some of which contained classified information.
The former president could be charged under the Espionage Act and or the Presidential Records Act. The Presidential Records Act states that official documents and other material or information a president or a vice president may have received during their tenure must go to NARA for preservation.
This means that ‘the official records of the President’ is owned by the public and not by any private entity.
Author Maggie Haberman who wrote the book ‘Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America’ said in the New York Times’ The Daily podcast that the boxes contained golf balls and raincoats among other documents of national importance.
Her biggest finding was that the former president flushed down papers through White House’s toilets and also did it on two occasions when he was on an overseas trip.
(with inputs from Vox and NBC)
Read the Latest News and Breaking News here
Comments
0 comment