After the search of his property, ex-US President Trump raises new allegations against the FBI. The officials are said to have taken three passports - "stolen", as Trump puts it. He sees it as an attack on a political opponent.
Former US President Donald Trump has accused the FBI of "stealing" his passports during a search of his Mar-a-Lago home. "Wow! During the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, they stole my three passports (one of them expired) along with everything else," Trump wrote on Truth Social, a social networking site he co-founded. "This is an attack on a political opponent on a level that our country has never seen before. Third World!" It remained unclear why Trump only spoke up a week after the search of his property in the US state of Florida.
A Florida court released the receipt for the confiscated items as well as the search warrant last Friday at the request of US Attorney General Merrick Garland. The list of confiscated items includes documents and several boxes. Passports are not explicitly listed there.
Trump had already accused the FBI over the weekend of "knowingly" taking material from his Mar-a-Lago estate that they shouldn't have taken with them. He asked the FBI to return the documents immediately. According to the 76-year-old, these are documents that are confidential between the client and the lawyer.
The FBI had found secret documents in Trump's home. The basis of the operation was the suspicion that Trump might have violated the Espionage Act and other laws, as the search warrant showed. In general, the truthfulness of Trump's statements is disputed. The Washington Post fact checkers had proven Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements during his four-year term from 2017 to 2021.
