An attorney for former President Donald Trump said FBI agents wanted to “sneak in” and “snoop around” during Monday’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Lindsey Halligan, an attorney for Trump, was present during the search, which media accounts have said was related to the possibility that classified documents were at Mar-a-Lago, having been taken from Washington in the waning days of the Trump administration.
Halligan said the raid is a symptom of something even worse than Trump being targeted.
“It’s unprecedented in United States history. The government seems to be out of control. It’s plagued with manipulation, corruption, greed and fraud,” she said Wednesday on Fox News’ “Hannity.”
The attorney said the FBI had taken over by the time she got there. “I arrived around 11 a.m. and there were about 30 to 40 FBI agents that I saw,” she said.
“They basically had unfettered access to the property. They refused to talk to me. They refused to let me in. All I knew is that they were searching areas one, two and three, which I understood to be the former president’s bedroom, his office and a storage room. And other than that, we were not allowed to talk to them or go inside at all,” Halligan said.
The corollary of unfettered access is that there was no restraint on what was done inside the property.
“They looked at God knows what in there and did God knows what in there. We have no idea,” she said.
“What the FBI did was an appalling display of abuse of power,” Halligan said.
Was the FBI raid an abuse of power?
She said the former president had been complying with document requests.
“All documents requested were previously handed over. President Trump and his team painstakingly reviewed every single document at Mar-a-Lago and gave the government what they requested. If they needed any other documents, they could have just asked,” the attorney said.
Halligan noted one other clandestine aspect of the raid.
“The warrant was secured under seal, so they tried to get away with concealing this overreach by obtaining a warrant under seal. Nobody knew about it,” she said.
The attorney said federal agents believed they could slip in and out without a fuss because Trump was in Bedminster, New Jersey, where his golf club recently hosted an LIV event.
“They knew that President Trump was in Bedminster and hasn’t been at Mar-a-Lago for some time,” Halligan said.
“They thought they could sneak in, snoop around without attorneys present and in case they walked out with nothing, so nobody would know that they overreached this degree,” she said.
In speaking to CBS News, Halligan said the search was “complete overkill.”
