Former president Donald Trump on Monday offered a litany of complaints after returning to his Florida home for the first time since FBI agents executed a court-authorised search for allegedly stolen government records there on 8 August.
Writing on his Truth Social website, Mr Trump said his arrival in Florida gave him a “long and detailed chance to check out the scene” of the FBI search, which the twice-impeached ex-president inaccurately described as “yet another government ‘crime,’ the FBI’s Raid and Break-In of my home”.
“I guess they don’t think there is a Fourth Amendment anymore, and to them, there isn’t,” said Mr Trump, who ignored the fact that the FBI agents who searched his Palm Beach home and office were doing so pursuant to a warrant signed by a federal magistrate judge who’d found probable cause — the legal standard laid out in the Fourth Amendment — to believe evidence of multiple federal crimes would be discovered there.
Continuing, Mr Trump accused the agents of having “ransacked” his property and claimed it would “never be the same”.
“It was ‘ransacked,’ and in far different condition than the way I left it,” he wrote, adding that the “many agents” who carried out the search “didn’t even take off their shoes in [his] bedroom”.
According to court documents, FBI agents found over 10,000 non-classified government documents spread across scores of boxes when they searched the twice-impeached ex-president’s home and office on 8 August.
Agents also discovered more than 100 “unique documents with classification markings”, including three stored in Mr Trump’s desk. Classification levels ranged from confidential – the lowest level of classification in the US system – to the highest, top secret.
Currently, prosecutors are barred from using any of the recovered documents to further their criminal investigation into the ex-president because a federal judge who he appointed to the bench has ordered them to be reviewed for privilege by a third-party special master.
