The FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home has raised political questions about the uniqueness of such an occurrence involving a former president. However, Trump’s presidency itself counted as unique.
Facing possible charges of violating the Espionage Act, which carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence, Trump has ramped up conspiracy rhetoric which some say resembles his approach during his presidency.
“Everyone was asked to leave the premises. They wanted to be alone,” Trump wrote on his social media platform about the FBI search of his home.
“Without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.’”
And despite the hot water his legal advisors including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others have found themselves in promoting conspiracy theories, Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, went on Fox News to sow nefarious seeds.
“I’m concerned that they may have planted something,” Habba said.
Even Trump’s allies in Congress suggested a criminal lack of integrity on the part of the FBI.
“How do we know they won’t put things into those boxes to entrap him,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) suggested on Fox News that the FBI sought to steal from Trump’s home.
“They’re probably using this [search] as an excuse to [take] whatever they could find,” Rubio stated.
Democrats have remained mum on the search but some journalists view the remarks and behavior of Trump and his allies as all-too-familiar.
“Trump has long used a strategy of portraying himself as the victim of persecution,” New York Times Journalist Maggie Haberman wrote.
Tim O’Brien, author of the book “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald,” told Haberman that Trump’s current behavior “is rooted in a long tradition that began with his father, Fred C. Trump, in which ‘authorities and law enforcement are out to get him and he is always the victim.’”
“It’s legally useful to him to do so and he knows painting himself as the victim is powerful to people in his camp,” O’Brien said.
Trump and some of his media defenders went back to “his old chestnut about how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been permitted to ‘acid wash’ emails, a fabrication loosely based on the fact that an email-deletion software program happens to be called BleachBit,” Daniel Dale reported for CNN.
In unsealing the warrant that authorized the FBI search, a federal judge allowed the public to see why the FBI searched Trump’s home. The warrant revealed that federal authorities are investigating Trump for removing or destroying records, obstructing an investigation and violating the U.S. Espionage Act.
Some of the contents of the boxes removed from Trump’s home included classified documents, photos, a handwritten note, information about France’s president and a clemency order for Trump supporter Roger Stone.
“The fact that the search was predicated on evidence of crimes committed under the Espionage Act is of enormous importance,” Ryan Goodman, a national security law expert and former special counsel to the Department of Defense, told USA Today.
“It suggests the Justice Department was given no choice but to act.”