Former President Donald Trump said he hasn’t released video from the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida because he doesn’t want to compromise the safety of the agents involved.
“They would rather not have me [release the footage] because of the safety of the FBI agents that swarmed the place,” Trump said Tuesday on Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.”
“I don’t think they wanted to swarm it, if you want to know the truth,” he said.
He continued: “I have a great relationship with people in the FBI … and for the safety of the people that are in the footage, they’ve asked us not to, not to put it out. But we do have it.”
“It’s not a pretty picture, either. It looks like a military coup,” Trump said.
Last month, the 45th president’s son, Eric Trump, said his father planned to release the damning footage “at the right time.”
Tellingly, the same motley crew of anti-Trump FBI officials who led the discredited Russiagate hoax engineered the Aug. 8 raid on Trump’s private residence in Palm Beach.
Numerous analysts have slammed the unprecedented raid as a partisan witch hunt designed to deter the former president from running again in 2024 and to intimidate his supporters.
Trump told Newsmax he believes the Biden administration has “weaponized” the Department of Justice to harass and persecute him by ransacking his home.
During the intrusive, invasive raid, he said, multiple FBI agents rifled through the private belongings of his wife, former first lady Melania Trump, and their 16-year-old son, Barron.
“You walk in and you say these people were in here and in your bedroom, and they were in Barron’s room and Melania’s room,” Trump said. “I mean, when you think, how terrible it is.”
The former president said his wife felt “very violated” when the agents stormed in and snooped through her closets, drawers and other personal effects.
“They go into a closet. They go through her dresses and who knows what else,” Trump said.
The FBI abuse was made all the worse because the agents left Mar-a-Lago in shambles after they ransacked the house.
“And it wasn’t left the way they found it. … I think it’s a disgrace that a thing like this could happen,” the former president said.
Trump said the Biden administration is “destroying our country” because it’s only good at “disinformation and cheating on elections. That’s all they’re good at. They’re not good at running a country.”
He reaffirmed his position that he did nothing wrong and the raid was a corrupt, politically motivated stunt to demean and bully him.
Should Trump release the footage of the Mar-a-Lago raid?
“We didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything wrong. There was nothing done wrong,” the former president told Newsmax.
Two constitutional law attorneys who worked in the administrations of former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush agreed the FBI search warrant was invalid.
In their Aug. 22 Wall Street Journal commentary, David Rivkin Jr. and Lee Casey said the FBI “had no legally valid cause for the raid” because a former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act supersede all of the laws the agency had cited in its warrant.
“The PRA explicitly guarantees a former president continuing access to his papers,” Rivkin and Casey wrote.
“His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.”
In other words, the Presidential Records Act covers whatever documents Trump had at his Mar-a-Lago residence, so the search warrant was invalid.
“Nothing in the PRA suggests that the former president’s physical custody of his records can be considered unlawful under the statutes on which the Mar-a-Lago warrant is based,” Rivkin and Casey wrote.
“Thus, if the Justice Department’s sole complaint is that Mr. Trump had in his possession presidential records he took with him from the White House, he should be in the clear, even if some of those records are classified.”
While Trump’s reluctance to release video from the raid is understandable, it might be a good idea to show the public how vindictive, corrupt and abusive the Biden administration is and how far it’ll go to persecute its political opponents.
If the FBI and this White House can do this to a billionaire former president, it can do this — and much worse — to the average American who’s not rich, powerful or connected.
