Trump claims the FBI threw documents on the floor at Mar-a-Lago ‘pretending it was me who did it’ – and ‘took pictures for the public to see’
- Trump responded to the bombshell Tuesday night DOJ filing on his Truth Social app on Wednesday morning
- He claimed it was FBI agents who threw the documents on the floor of Mar-a-Lago during their raid
- The former president then insinuated the agents were ‘pretending it was me’ and took photos for the public
- ‘Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!’ he added during a flurry of posts
Donald Trump has claimed the FBI agents were responsible for throwing classified documents on the floor of Mar-a-Lago – and said they were ‘perhaps pretending it was me who did it’.
‘Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see,’ he said in a Truth Social post Wednesday morning.
‘Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!’ he added during a flurry of posts condemning the FBI agent who retired amid backlash over the Hunter Biden probe.
He was responding to the bombshell pictures showing papers – with many marked ‘top secret’ – on the carpet of Florida mansion during the August 8 search.
The photographs were released in a 36-page court filing where officials said they’d uncovered a plot to obstruct the probe into the discovery of government records.
The DOJ accused the ex-president’s team of moving around and hiding classified documents they had previously searched for.
Officials claimed they were ‘likely concealed and removed’ from a padlocked storage room where Trump’s lawyers had said they were all kept together.
The new court filing also shot down attempts to get a ‘special master’ – a third party – to review the documents seized by the FBI, branding the move ‘unnecessary’ and saying it would ‘harm national security interests’.
The FBI seized 33 boxes with over 100 classified records during its raid – and found classified documents stashed in Trump’s office, according to the filing.
The filing, released late Tuesday, lays out the most detailed chronology of months of strained interactions between the DOJ and the ex-president’s team.
It offers another indication of the sheer volume of classified records retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.
It shows how investigators conducting a criminal probe have focused not just on why the records were stored there, but also on whether the Trump team intentionally misled them about the continued, and unlawful, presence of the top secret documents.
The timeline laid out by the Justice Department made clear that the extraordinary search of Mar-a-Lago came only after other efforts to retrieve the records had failed.
It shows it resulted from law enforcement suspicion additional documents remained inside the mansion despite assurances a ‘diligent search’ had accounted for them.
