On Truth Social on Thursday night, Donald Trump repeatedly stated that he wanted to “release the docs” about the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this week.
“Not only will I support the disclosure of records pertaining to the un-American, unjustified, and pointless raid…
By encouraging the rapid release of those records, I am taking things a step further,” Trump said in a late-night message on his own social media account.
The fact that Trump really possesses the documents—and is free to share them since the FBI first knocked on the door of his Florida home on Monday—was something Trump failed to mention on Truth Social.
“They have to leave a copy of the search warrant as well as the inventory of what they took at the location where they took it. It’s up to [Trump’s team] whether they want to show the rest of the world what that says,” David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida, told VICE News.
Hours after the Department of Justice sought to unseal the search warrant and other papers connected to the FBI probe, Trump posted on social media. Attorney General Merrick Garland made the announcement during a brief press conference on Thursday, the DOJ’s first public statement following the historic search of an ex-residence. president’s
The DOJ submitted the application to unseal to a South Florida court. As a result, the original warrant’s signer, Judge Bruce Reinhart, got ferocious death threats. Reinhart gave the Justice Department until Friday at 3 p.m. to let him know whether Trump’s team approved of the search-related records being unsealed.
According to Florida-based Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan, CBS reported on Thursday that Trump’s legal team has been debating whether to make the papers they have available.
As reported by CBS, the FBI asked for the private security cameras at Mar-a-Lago to be turned off. Halligan claimed their team has footage and pictures of the search taken by those cameras. Apparently, Trump’s legal counsel declined. According to Halligan, Trump’s legal team is thinking of making the video public.
Halligan also disclosed to CBS that the FBI had provided them with a “bare-bones” search warrant that omitted the justifications for the search. The list of things confiscated from Mar-a-Lago, she continued, was likewise “vague.”
Given the potentially damaging nature of the goods sought during the search—among them, “nuclear papers,” according to Thursday’s story from the Washington Post—legal Trump’s team may not really want the search warrant and related documents made public.
Trump called the Washington Post piece a “hoax” in an early Friday morning post on Truth Social before reinforcing the unfounded conspiracy idea that the FBI placed evidence at his house.
Trump’s fans, including several prominent Republican Party officials, elements of the right-wing media, and the far-right, have reacted violently to the search of Mar-a-Lago. They have promoted and spearheaded calls for civil war, and internet radicals have doxed and brutally threatened Reinhart and his family.
Trump admirer who used an AR-15-style weapon and a nail gun to assault an FBI office in Cincinnati on Thursday said on social media that the search of Trump’s house had motivated him to act.
The assailant, like Trump, was a regular user of Truth Social, and while being pursued by police authorities in the midst of the attack, he changed his status there one last time.
Hours before the 42-year-old was fatally shot during an armed confrontation with police, he said, “If you don’t hear from me, it is true I attempted assaulting the F.B.I. and it’ll mean either I was pulled off the internet, the F.B.I. got me, or they dispatched the normal policemen.”
