Former president Donald Trump started his Labor Day holiday on Monday by airing a series of grievances and lies about the 8 August search of his Florida home and claiming that the United States is “broken” because federal law enforcement has never had occasion to search the home of the man who defeated him in the 2020 election.
Writing on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump complained that the FBI agents who executed a court-authorised search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago club “riffled” through rooms occupied by his youngest son, Barron, and his wife Melania Trump had not also searched homes belonging to President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
The FBI obtained the warrant from a Florida federal magistrate judge on 5 August after the judge found probable cause to believe that evidence of several federal crimes concerning the handling of national defence information and obstruction of justice would be found at Mr Trump’s Palm Beach property.
Agents recovered more than 15 boxes of evidence from the ex-president’s home, including over 11,000 non-classified records and several hundred documents marked as classified at the highest levels. All records created during Mr Trump’s time in the White House are by law government property and should have been turned over to the National Archives when his term as president expired. The ex-president has offered no explanation for why he would be in possession of so many government records long after he lost the legal right to have them.
The elder Mr Biden has never been credibly accused of a federal crime that would require an FBI search of his home. Although the Department of Justice has been investigating whether Hunter Biden, an attorney and former lobbyist, violated any federal tax or lobbying laws in his private business dealings, he has not been charged with any crime and his home has not been searched.
Nonetheless, Mr Trump — without evidence — accused both Bidens of “proven high crimes, treason, and just plain theft” and suggested their guilt could be ascertained by the contents of a laptop hard drive from which some news organisations have authenticated emails belonging to Hunter Biden.
“They never Raided or Broke Into the house of Hunter Biden or, perhaps even more importantly, the house of Joe Biden - A treasure trove!” Mr Trump write, adding that the the US is “unfair,” “broken,” and a “nation in decline” because of the FBI’s failure to conduct unjustified searches of his former opponent.
The twice-impeached ex-president also lashed out at a recently-retired FBI special agent who, in his rendering of events, was “given” the alleged laptop “11 days before” the 2020 election.
Mr Trump complained that the agent refused to violate multiple Department of Justice regulations and federal laws by leaking information about the hard drive with the aim of damaging Mr Biden’s presidential campaign in the same way a late October 2016 letter from then-FBI director James Comey turned polls to his advantage during his previous campaign against Hillary Clinton.
“He would NOT reveal it to anyone, knowing it would knock Biden out of the race - wouldn’t even be close,” he wrote, adding for good measure that the 2020 election was “rigged” (it was not) and the FBI is “corrupt” because agents did not actively intervene to help him win (which would have been unlawful).
In a subsequent post, Mr Trump called for the US to “redo the crooked election” because the acting head of the Department of Justice’s criminal division, Nicholas McQuaid, and the attorney for Hunter Biden, Chris Clark, were both partners at the fourth-largest law firm in the United States, Latham and Watkins.
According to the National Law Journal, the firm has 3,078 attorneys spread across 28 offices around the world.
