Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the FBI refused to let his attorneys watch the raid at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
In a message on Truth Social, Trump said the FBI wouldn’t let anyone from his staff “anywhere near the areas” that were being searched during Monday’s raid.
“Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting,'” he added.
“Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out? Obama and Clinton were never ‘raided,’ despite big disputes!” Trump concluded.
The FBI reportedly spent nine hours examining Trump’s office Monday. They also broke into his safe and searched Melania Trump’s wardrobe.
In addition, a locked basement storage room where 15 boxes of material from the White House were stored was searched.
The New York Post reported that the material was “packed up by the General Services Administration and shipped to Mar-a-Lago when Trump left office in January 2020.”
Some letters from former President Barack Obama and North Korea leader Kim Jong Un were included in the boxes.
Trump had expressed concern that agents could have “planted stuff” because they would not allow his lawyers inside the 128-room estate while 30 agents from the Southern District of Florida and the FBI’s Washington field office searched it.
A day after the shocking raid, Trump met with nearly a dozen members of the House Republican Study Committee at his New Jersey golf club, Bedminister.
Rep. Jim Banks told Fox News that Trump “didn’t seem defeated in the least bit — he was very fired up, very upbeat”.
Trump reportedly told the group he “has made up his mind” about his presidential run, and “enjoyed encouragement” from them to “get the decision out sooner rather than later.”