An FBI raid on Monday on former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home and the breaking open of a safe reportedly in connection with an investigation into Trump’s handling of official papers have been described as ‘extraordinary steps’ that are unprecedented in American history.
The BBC reports that Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg has said there has never been a search warrant quite like this in American history. He said his office was not notified in advance.
A former district attorney, Wendy Olson, commented: ‘It’s hard to believe… that federal law enforcement… would take these extraordinary steps if there wasn’t substantial evidence.’
Olson said the warrant would have been subjected to a ‘rigorous application’, signed off and vetted by those at the ‘highest levels’ of the Department of Justice and the FBI – including the Trump-appointed FBI director Chris Wray.
Thomas Schwartz, a professor at Vanderbilt University who studies and writes about the presidency, said there was ‘no precedent’ for a former president facing an FBI raid, even going back to the Watergate scandal (when five men with links to the White House broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972, launching a scandal that eventually led to President Richard Nixon resigning).
Trump himself commented: ‘These are dark times for our nation. Nothing like this has ever happened to a president of the United States before.’ He blamed ‘Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for president in 2024’.
Supporters endorsed this view. One, Republican strategist Seth Weathers, called the operation at Trump’s Florida home ‘truly, unbelievably outrageous’.
Weathers claimed the legal authorisation of the search warrant was politically motivated, asserting that what he called the ‘overreach’ from Joe Biden’s administration had reached levels.
However, the BBC reports, Biden has tried to distance himself from the justice department, with a White House official saying the president was given no advanced notice of Monday’s FBI search.
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi agreed the FBI search on former Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was a ‘pretty serious step’, adding: ‘But nonetheless, we believe in the rule of law, and that’s what our country is about and no person is above the law, not even the president of the United States, not even a former president of the United States.’
The BBC notes that the raid will likely galvanise Trump’s base to turn out and vote Republican in November’s midterm elections, and that it could prompt Trump himself to declare his candidacy for the presidency early.
While the BBC says Trump supporters believe it’s good for them – they are fundraising off the raid –some commentators have said he could be barred from standing ‘because it’s been suggested he could be disqualified from holding public office if he is found guilty of a crime over his handling of government records’.
[Image: Gage Skidmore, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52081539]