Days after federal agents raided the home of former President Donald J. Trump in Florida, he posted dozens of posts on Truth Social, his social media platform, about Democrats, the FBI and other perceived enemies.
The statements reflect a strategy Mr. Trump has long used to deal with controversies, alternating between denying any wrongdoing while diverting attention. Some of the posts also reflect his penchant for making false and misleading claims.
Here are some of the false and unsubstantiated claims he made after the FBI search.
Monday and Tuesday August 8 and 9
After the search becomes public, Trump suggests without evidence that Biden played a role.
In the days following the raid, allies of Mr. Trump focused attention on an FBI search warrant at his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. Those warrants usually remain sealed unless charges are filed, but many of his supporters offered that the FBI is not releasing him because the search was politically motivated.
Mr. Trump could release the warrant at any time. Instead, he repeatedly linked the White House to the search, suggesting that President Biden or other Democrats knew about it.
“Biden knew all about it,” he wrote on August 9. He did not present any evidence.
Corinne Jean-Pierre, a White House press secretary, said President Biden was not given advance search notice.
More coverage of FBI search of Trump home
Wednesday, August 10
Trump suggests, without evidence, that the FBI may have planted evidence. He then makes false statements about Obama.
Mr. Trump said his lawyers and others at Mar-a-Lago were not allowed to observe the search, and suggested that the lack of oversight may have allowed the FBI to gather evidence.
He wrote in Truth Social that agents don’t want witnesses to “see what they’re doing, taking away or hopefully not being ‘planted’.”
But Mr. Trump’s lawyer said during a TV interview that the former president watched the search from New York on security camera footage at Mar-a-Lago.
Mr Trump also took aim at former President Barack Obama, falsely claiming his predecessor moved more than 30 million documents to Chicago after leaving the White House. In a subsequent message, Mr. Trump increased the number to 33 million documents.
The National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, responded in a statement, saying that “NARA has moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area, where they are held exclusively by NARA.”
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Thursday, August 11
After reports suggest classified documents are the focus, Trump suggests the raid was unnecessary.
After reports revealed the FBI was seeking documents related to “special access programs,” a term reserved for highly sensitive operations and closely guarded technology, Mr. Trump said the FBI could have requested the documents without a raid.
He wrote to Truth Social that the FBI has already asked him to install an additional lock in the area where the protected documents are kept.
“My attorneys and representatives have been fully cooperative and a very good relationship has been established,” he wrote on August 11. – The government could have everything it wanted if we had it.”
This spring, Mr. Trump received a subpoena demanding more documents, and federal officials met with Mr. Trump and his lawyer, Evan Corcoran, at Mar-a-Lago. After the visit, at least one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers signed a written statement saying that all material marked classified and stored in boxes at Mar-a-Lago had been returned.
But a list of materials taken from Mr. Trump’s home during a search last week showed that agents seized 11 sets of sensitive or classified documents.
Friday, August 12
After the FBI’s log of seized documents shows that some are marked classified, Trump says without evidence that the documents have already been declassified.
After a Florida court issued the warrant, an accompanying log showed that 11 sets of classified documents had been removed from Mar-a-Lago. The warrant also revealed that the investigation involved a violation of the Espionage Act.
Mr. Trump then suggested that the documents seized by the FBI were legitimate.
“First, everything was declassified,” he wrote.
While presidents have broad powers to declassify information while in office, Espionage Act violations still apply to declassified documents.
Saturday and Sunday, August 13 and 14
Trump repeats baseless claims that documents may have been planted.
In a series of posts on Truth Social, Mr Trump doubled down on his criticism of the FBI, saying the agency “has a long and unrelenting history of corruption”. He listed the discredited claims of meddling in the 2016 election.
Mr Trump then returned to his earlier unsubstantiated claims that the documents could have been planted by the FBI
“There was no way to know if what they took was legal or ‘plant?'” he wrote. “It was the FBI after all!”
