The FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is having more and more effects on politics.
On Saturday, the political battle lines got clearer after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort home of President Trump.
A top Republican in the Senate wants the evidence that convinced a judge to let the agency do something that had never been done before: break into the home of an ex-president.
At the same time, Democrats criticized the GOP’s talk about the FBI, which they said put agents in danger.
“There is political bias within the FBI,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Fox News. “I think it’s fair to ask how President Trump has been treated.”
Grassley agreed with House Republicans who said Friday that the Department of Justice should hand over not only the FBI’s search warrant but also the supporting affidavit. This is a document that explains why investigators thought that the 45th president was illegally keeping papers from his single term in office.
“Full transparency will happen when they release the affidavit,” Grassley said, refuting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s claim that only a full-on raid, not “less intrusive” methods, could be used to get documents out of Trump’s hands.
“Just think about the double standard we’ve had with the FBI for a long time,” Grassley said, citing scandals like the fake FISA warrants against Trump adviser Carter Page, the anti-Trump Christopher Steele dossier, and the soft-touch investigation of Hillary Clinton’s secret email server.
During a weekend trip to California, Vice President Kamala Harris broke her silence about the Mar-a-Lago situation on Friday night.
“As a former prosecutor and a citizen of our country, I will say that any attacks on law enforcement are completely unacceptable,” she said in comments that were made public early Saturday morning.
“Any so-called leader whose words suggest that law enforcement should be put in that kind of danger is being irresponsible,” she said.
CNN said that a 42-year-old gunman was killed in a shootout Thursday after he tried to attack an FBI field office in Cincinnati. The agency says it has received a “unprecedented” number of threats since the search of Trump’s home became public.
Biden hasn’t said anything about the FBI’s search while he and his family are on vacation at a beach in South Carolina.
But Trump and some of his fellow Republicans have been very harsh on the agency since they searched his property on Monday. The former president said that the Department of Justice “coordinated an attack with Radical Left Democrat state and local [district attorneys] and [attorneys general],” and he even said that the FBI might have planted evidence.
“Like all the other hoaxes and scams they’ve used to try to shut up most of the American people, I have TRUTH on my side,” Trump wrote in an email to his supporters on Saturday.
