Trump says Mar-a-Lago will ‘never be the same again’ as he returns for the first time since the raid

Donald Trump complained that FBI agents did not take off their shoes when searching his Mar-a-Lago estate and said his stay in Florida “will never be the same.”

Shortly after the August 8 raid, the former president revealed that officers were “sniffing” his wife Melania’s closet and said earlier this month they had also done “a deep and ugly search” of his 16-year-old son’s bedroom. barron.

Returning to his Florida home on Sunday night, Trump said the changes were noticeable from nearly two months earlier when it was searched by about 30 FBI agents.

“Arrived in Florida last night and had a long and detailed opportunity to view the scene of yet another ‘government crime,’ the FBI raid and break-in at my home, Mar-a-Lago,” Trump posted on his social media website Truth social. “I don’t think they think there’s a Fourth Amendment anymore, and for them there isn’t either.”

“Anyway, after what they’ve done, the place will never be the same,” he lamented. “It was ‘looted’ and in a very different state from how I left it.”

‘Lots of cops – And they didn’t even take their shoes off in my bedroom. Nice!!!’

The post came after President Joe Biden first provided a comprehensive response to Trump’s handling of classified documents in a lengthy 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday.

Biden labeled his predecessor “totally irresponsible” after top-secret documents were found at his Mar-a-Lago estate during the FBI raid.

The Scott Pelley sit-down was the first interview in more than 200 days — and was broadcast while President and First Lady Jill Biden was in London for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.

His condemnation of Trump’s handling of classified documents was more than the mockery he uttered when asked about the incident in August.

When Biden saw the classified documents emerge after an Aug. 8 FBI search at Trump’s Florida residence in Mar-a-Lago, Biden wondered “how could anyone be so irresponsible.”

‘I thought, what data was there in those sources and methods that could jeopardize? And by that I mean names of people who help etc, and it’s just totally irresponsible,” he added.

Biden’s one-on-one with the CBS program was the first ’60 Minutes’ interview he did as president — and his first sit-down interview with Lester Holt since February.

The interview was conducted in Detroit last week when Biden was there on tour at the auto show.

The comments about his predecessor’s investigation broke Biden’s pattern of not commenting on the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Trump for taking sensitive material to his Florida residence after his term in office ended in January 2021.

Biden defeated Republican Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump, who has run for office again, has described the court-approved search as politically motivated.

Biden said he had not received a secret briefing on the contents of those documents.

“I didn’t ask for the details of those documents because I don’t want to get involved in whether or not the Justice Department should take certain actions they can take,” Biden said. “I agreed that I wouldn’t tell them what to do and in fact I wouldn’t tell them how to prosecute or not.”

The Justice Department has said it is investigating Trump for removing White House records because it believes he was in illegal possession of documents, including some related to intelligence gathering and clandestine human sources — one of America’s Best Kept Secrets.

The FBI says it needed about 11,000 documents, including about 100 with classification markings, that were found in a storage room and office while serving a court-authorized search warrant on Aug. 8.

The vast majority of documents and materials seized in the raid had no classification marks, according to an inventory list released earlier this month.

Weeks after the search, Trump’s lawyers asked a judge to appoint a special master to conduct an independent review of the data, which was allowed.

The order says federal agents were investigating possible violations of three different federal laws, including one governing the collection, transmission or loss of defense information under the Espionage Act.

Biden’s intelligence chief is also investigating whether the disclosure of information in those documents posed national security risks.

In the interview on various topics, the president would not commit to being re-elected in 2024, although he has said in the past that he plans to do so.

“My intention, as I said to start with, is for me to run again,” he said. “But it’s just an intention. But is it a firm decision that I will run again? That remains to be seen.’

Biden was asked about growing concerns that Russia’s attempts to seize Ukraine could inspire Chinese leader Xi Jinping to attack Taiwan. The island is recognized by the US as part of China, but has its own democratic government. Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin met last week.

He said US troops would respond “if there really were an unprecedented attack.”

White House officials later said official US policy had not changed and would not say whether US troops would be called up to defend Taiwan. Biden has made the claim before, but the statements come at an increasingly tense time for US-China relations, especially after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip there last month.

Beijing sees official US contact with Taiwan as an encouragement to make the island’s decades-old de facto independence permanent, a move Biden and other US leaders say they do not support.

The president said the US commitment to Ukraine was “cast-in-one” and would remain so “as long as it takes.” Ukrainian forces are engaged in a counter-offensive that has reclaimed towns and cities from Russian forces. But the toll the war has taken is enormous and new atrocities are being exposed, including torture chambers and mass graves. Since January 2021, the US has provided more than $13.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine.