Day two of protests outside Trump’s Florida residence draws raucous crowd

For the second consecutive day, irate Donald Trump supporters descended on his Mar-a-Lago home to protest the FBI raided as part of an investigation into whether he took classified records from the White House to the Florida residence. 

DailyMail.com cameras saw tons of pro-Trump signs, along with a smattering of anti-Trump protesters near the gated estate on Tuesday after many came just hours after the ex-president himself announced the investigation. 

Trump, disclosing the search in a lengthy statement, claimed that agents had opened up a safe at his home and described their work as an ‘unannounced raid’ that he called ‘prosecutorial misconduct.’

He accused the FBI of a double standard, claiming the bureau ‘allowed’ Hillary Clinton to ‘acid wash’ 33,000 emails from her time as secretary of state. 

Those in his camp said the raid was a clear attempt to thwart a potential 2024 presidential run. 

Tuesday, supporters brought more and more pro-Trump signs and were in general more organized and passionate, with groups like the far right Proud Boys and Blacks for Trump professing their support outside Mar-a-Lago. 

Signs became more and more creative, with one even depicting the former president as John Rambo.  

The former president spent much of the day posting to his TRUTH social media platform, both complaining about his treatment by the feds and celebrating primary victories for candidates he endorsed. 

Trump wrote earlier Tuesday evening: ‘We are no better than a third world country, a banana republic’ echoing the words of many conservatives, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 

He also celebrated the primary victory for Joe Kent over pro-impeachment Washington State Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler: ‘Joe Kent just won an incredible race against all odds in Washington State. Importantly, he knocked out yet another impeacher, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who so stupidly played right into the hands of the Democrats’. 

The raid on Trump’s home intensifies the months-long probe into how classified documents ended up in more than a dozen boxes located at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year. 

It occurs amid a separate grand jury investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and adds to the potential legal peril for Trump as he lays the groundwork for another run.

Familiar battle lines, forged during a four-year presidency shadowed by FBI and congressional investigations, quickly took shape again in the wake of Monday night. 

Trump and his allies sought to cast the search as a weaponization of the criminal justice system and a Democratic-driven effort to keep him from winning another term in 2024 – even though the Biden White House said it had no prior knowledge of it, and the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, was appointed by Trump five years ago and served as a high-ranking official in a Republican-led Justice Department.

The defense serves as a fresh reminder of the former president’s enduring grip on the GOP, as speculation remains as to whether he will run again in 2024. 

‘The sooner he kicks off his campaign, the better,’ Indiana GOP Rep. Jim Banks, the chair of the Republican Study Committee, said in an interview.

Banks was among about a dozen Republican lawmakers who spent several hours Tuesday evening with Trump at his summer home in Bedminster, New Jersey. During a meal that included steak, scallops, mashed potatoes, salad and a Trump cookie, the group talked about the upcoming midterm elections and the 2024 presidential race, Banks said.

The former president told the lawmakers ‘his mind is made up’ about a 2024 campaign and ‘we’ll all be happy with his decision.’

The FBI search seemed to trigger a shift among Trump’s advisers, who had been privately urging him to wait until after the midterm elections to announce his intention to seek the presidency again. Suddenly, some of those same advisers were urging him to launch his campaign before the November elections.

Trump stoked such speculation in the hours after the search by posting a campaign-style video on social media. ‘The best is yet to come,’ he said.

He followed up with a fundraising appeal, making it personal by declaring ‘it’s important that you know that it wasn’t just my home that was violated – it was the home of every patriotic American who I have been fighting for.’

In Columbia, South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham said he spoke with Trump and felt sure another campaign was coming.

‘One thing I can tell you,’ Graham said. ‘I believed he was going to run before. I’m stronger in my belief now.’

As Republicans rallied behind Trump, Democrats pushed back against GOP claims of political interference, without evidence. Some accused the GOP of a departure from its longstanding commitment to ‘law and order.’

‘The FBI director was appointed by Donald Trump,’ said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Asked if the raid might hurt Democrats in the November elections, she said: ‘You’re talking about if the Justice Department decides to have a warrant to go in because they suspect something is justified, it´s going to have an impact on the election? No, no, no, no, no.’

Some of Trump’s most vocal Republican critics still shied away from embracing the former president. And it was unclear how rank-and-file Republican voters and independents frustrated by Trump’s divisive leadership might be moved by the new developments.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor and one of many Republicans considering a 2024 presidential bid, noted Tuesday that a federal judge had to sign off on the warrant.

‘The former president is presumed innocent,’ Christie said in an interview. ‘On the other hand, we can’t immediately impugn the motives of the prosecutors just because they’re from another political party.’

‘It’s an extraordinary action. And there better be some pretty extraordinary facts to underlie it. If there are, then they have every right to do it.’

And some other Republican officials seemed to express continued concerns about Trump by refusing to weigh in at all.

The relatively short list of those GOP leaders who remained silent Tuesday afternoon was led by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has privately encouraged his party to move past Trump. But the Kentucky Republican eventually weighed in, saying: ‘The country deserves a thorough and immediate explanation of what led to the events of Monday. Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately.’

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is gearing up for a presidential run of his own, said he shared ‘the deep concerns of millions of Americans’ over the search of Trump’s private residence.

He stopped short of attacking the FBI, however. Instead, he said Attorney General Merrick Garland should ‘give a full accounting to the American people as to why this action was taken and he must do so immediately.’

Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri aggressively condemned the Justice Department on Trump’s behalf.

Hawley called the search ‘an unprecedented assault on democratic norms and the rule of law.’ He called for Garland’s resignation or impeachment and the removal of FBI Director Wray.

Cotton said Garland had ‘weaponized’ the Justice Department against his political enemies. ‘There will be consequences for this,’ he warned.

Also from Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, still another Republican weighing a 2024 run, called the search ‘unprecedented and alarming.’ But like Pence, he added, ‘We must see the probable cause affidavit before making a judgment.’

The search intensified the months-long probe into how classified documents ended up in boxes of White House records located at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year. A separate grand jury is investigating efforts by Trump and allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump did not elaborate on the basis for the search, but the Justice Department has been investigating the potential mishandling of classified information after the National Archives and Records Administration said it had retrieved from Mar-a-Lago 15 boxes of records containing classified information earlier this year. 

The National Archives said Trump should have turned over that material upon leaving office, and it asked the Justice Department to investigate.

There are multiple federal laws governing the handling of classified records and sensitive government documents, including statutes that make it a crime to remove such material and retain it at an unauthorized location. 

Though a search warrant does not suggest that criminal charges are near or even expected, federal officials looking to obtain one must first demonstrate to a judge that they have probable cause that a crime occurred.

Two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said the search happened earlier Monday and was related to the records probe. Agents were also looking to see if Trump had additional presidential records or any classified documents at the estate.

Trump has previously maintained that presidential records were turned over ‘in an ordinary and routine process.’  

His son Eric Trump, who was also spotted at Trump Tower on Monday, said he was the one that got the call on the raid and told his father about it.

‘I was the guy who got the call this morning and I called my father and let him know it happened, and I was involved all day,’ he told Fox News host Sean Hannity. 

‘Welcome to politics in the 2020s.’

‘To have 30 FBI agents – actually more than that – descend on Mar-a-Lago, give absolutely, you know, no notice, go through the gates, start ransacking an office, ransacking a closet – you know, they broke into a safe. 

‘He didn’t even have anything in the safe. I mean, give me a break.’

Asked how the documents ended up at Mar-a-Lago, Eric Trump said the boxes were among items that got moved out of the White House during ‘six hours’ on Inauguration Day, as the Bidens prepared to move into the building.

‘My father always kept press clippings,’ Eric Trump said. 

‘He had boxes, when he moved out of the White House.’

He charged President Joe Biden’s White House as the force behind the raid.

‘This didn’t come from a local FBI field office in Palm Beach, Florida. 

‘You know this came from? This came from one place and one building, and that is the White House in Washington, D.C. They want to attack a guy who they view as his greatest threat, Biden’s greatest threat,’ Eric Trump said.

Biden’s White House had no heads up on the matter. Senior White House officials found out about it via Twitter, The New York Times reported.

Lara Trump told Fox News ‘look, my father-in-law, as anybody knows, who’s been around him a lot, loves to save things like newspaper clippings, magazine clippings, photographs, documents that he had every authority… to take from the White House.’

She called the raid an attempt to hurt him as her father-in-law may ‘announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024.’ 

Trump emerged from Trump Tower in New York City shortly before 8 p.m. and waved to bystanders before being driven away in an SUV.

In his first public remarks since news of the search surfaced, Trump made no mention of it during a tele-town hall on behalf of Leora Levy, the Connecticut Republican he has endorsed in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate primary to pick a general election opponent against Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal. 

Trump gave his public backing to Levy late last week, calling her on Monday the best pick ‘to replace Connecticut’s joke of a senator.’

But in a social media post Monday night, he was much more unguarded, calling the search a ‘weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.’

Other Republicans echoed that message. GOP National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel denounced the search as ‘outrageous’ and said it was a reason for voters to turn out in November.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate, said in a statement on Twitter that it was ‘an escalation in the weaponization’ of U.S. government agencies.’ 

Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, said in a tweet that the Justice Department ‘has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization’ and said that if Republicans win control of the U.S. House, they will investigate the department.

That Trump would become entangled in a probe into the handling of classified information is all the more striking given how he tried during the 2016 presidential election to exploit an FBI investigation into his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information via a private email server she used as secretary of state. 

The then-FBI Director James Comey concluded that Clinton had sent and received classified information but the FBI did not recommend criminal charges because it determined that Clinton had not intended to break the law.

Trump lambasted that decision and then stepped up his criticism of the FBI as agents began investigating whether his campaign had colluded with Russia to tip the 2016 election. He fired Comey during that probe, and though he appointed Wray months later, he repeatedly criticized him, too, as president.

Thomas Schwartz, a Vanderbilt University history professor who studies and writes about the presidency, said there is no precedent for a former president facing an FBI raid – even going back to Watergate. President Richard Nixon wasn’t allowed to take tapes or other materials from the White House when he resigned in 1974, Schwartz noted, and many of his papers remained in Washington for years before being transferred to his presidential library in California.

‘This is different and it is a sign of how unique the Trump period was,’ said Schwartz, author of ‘Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography.’ ‘How his behavior was so unusual.’

The probe is hardly the only legal headache confronting Trump. A separate investigation related to efforts by Trump and his allies to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election – which led to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol – has also been intensifying in Washington. Several former White House officials have received grand jury subpoenas.

And a district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, is investigating whether Trump and his close associates sought to interfere in that state’s election, which was won by Democrat Joe Biden.