The 30 heavily armed FBI agents who raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate were authorized to use deadly force, according to recently released records, and had a trauma team embedded with maps to the nearest hospital.
Authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland, the tactical team was after documents Trump took with him when he left office in 2021. Lawyers for the former chief executive had been in discussion with the National Archives to turn over the material and argued that the raid on Trump’s Florida home was completely unnecessary. They suggested that the documents contain information that would incriminate Biden and his associates in various crimes and that the show of force is part of a White House strategy to hamper Trump’s campaign to take back the Oval Office.
The Justice Department said deploying armed agents prepared for bloodshed is “standard operating procedure” for paperwork acquisition, an explanation Trump advocates reject since this was the first time in U.S. history a former president’s home was raided by government forces sent by a political opponent. Trump, who was supposed to be home at the time but was delayed, enjoys Secret Service protection, along with his family. It is unclear if the raid was coordinated with his security team and how they would have reacted if the weapons carried by the FBI forces had been fired.
The public seems to side with Trump since his poll numbers go up each time a federal official or Democrat prosecutor marshaled by Biden goes after his Republican rival. The Mar-a-Lago documents case is on thin ice as the Florida judge overseeing the trial ordered hearings on how the special prosecutor appointed by Biden handled the evidence seized from the estate. After the armed agents swept through the estate, having ransacked former First Lady Melania Trump’s quarters and the bedroom of their son, Baron, the FBI displayed boxes of evidence to the press that had apparently been tampered with. The hearings before federal Judge Aileen Cannon will also examine defense allegations that some of the seized documents are missing.
The treatment of Trump, who as president can access any documents he sees fit, is vastly different than that of Biden, who was found to have classified material he obtained as vice president, a position that does not give him authority to possess such documents. When Biden’s lawyers realized he had secret government records in his garage and other locations, such as the Communist China-funded Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, they arranged for the Justice Department to come pick them up.
Trump characterizes the documents imbroglio and the other Biden-coordinated cases as “election interference,” one of the charges against him in Georgia, where the Fulton County district attorney accuses him of interfering with the 2020 contest.