The FBI agents who searched the home of former President Donald Trump in Florida on Monday were looking for documents about nuclear weapons, among other things. Sources with knowledge of the federal investigation have said so at The Washington Post, the newspaper reported in the night from Thursday to Friday. It is not clear whether those documents were also found. After the search, the FBI carried ten boxes full of documents from Trump’s home on the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach.
The rationale for the search shows how serious the concerns of US authorities are about the state documents that Trump illegally took home after his loss of election in 2021. Justice Secretary Merrick Garland personally approved the search, he said Thursday, a decision he said he had “not taken lightly”. It has often been said about Mar-a-Lago that it anything but well secured is. Political news site Politico once called it a “heaven for spies”.
The search of Trump’s home sparked a stir in the United States. Never before has anything like this happened to a former president. The FBI has not yet released an official statement about the search. As a result, much remains unclear. In the interest of transparency, the US Department of Justice wants to make the search warrant public, as well as a list of seized documents and goods. Trump declared himself in favor of that on Friday. Whether it will actually happen is up to the judge.
It remains such an intense week for Trump. He was questioned under oath in New York on Wednesday over possible financial fraud at The Trump Organization. The interrogation lasted six hours, Trump — convinced that the investigation is a politically motivated “witch hunt” — remained silent the whole time. New York’s chief justice Letitia James said more than three years of investigations have revealed evidence that The Trump Organization has been tampering with numbers.
Also read: Trump house search is political gunpowder