Former US president Donald Trump has accused America's top domestic spy agency of a “sneak attack” raid on his Florida home, saying the country is ‘in a very dangerous position’.
In an interview with Fox News a week after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents raided his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and seized classified documents, Trump said the entire country is "angry" about it.
The former president warned that “the temperature has to be brought down in the country” or “terrible things are going to happen”, slamming the FBI for what he called a “sneak attack” raid.
According to the US Justice Department, FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Florida home on August 8 seized 11 sets of classified documents, including those marked as top secret.
Trump rejected the claims in a statement posted on his social media platform, insisting that the records were "all declassified" and placed in "secure storage."
Following last week’s raid on the former president’s Florida estate, outrage and fierce criticism among his supporters has ended in a spike of threats to law enforcement agencies.
“The country is in a very dangerous position,” Trump told Fox News Digital. “There is tremendous anger like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one — years of scams and witch hunts, and now this.”
“If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that,” the 45th US president noted.
Trump claimed his legal team had contacted the Justice Department and offered to assist in their probe into whether the former president violated three federal laws dealing with government information, but had not received any response.
"They break into a president’s house – a sneak attack where it was totally," Trump said. "No one ever thought a thing like this would happen,” saying it was a “very dangerous time” for the country.
He claimed the FBI agents had asked his team to turn off the cameras while standing outside, accusing the agency of being able to "plant anything they wanted" while conducting the search.
The former US president called the house raid a “scam”, which he said reflected on “years of fake witch hunts and phony Russia, Russia, Russia schemes and scams.”
“There is tremendous anger like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one – years of scams and witch hunts, and now this.”
The search, under the Espionage Act, was conducted as part of a federal probe into whether Trump illegally removed documents when he left office in January 2021 after being defeated by his Democratic Party rival Joe Biden in the presidential election two months.
On Sunday, Trump called on the Department of Justice to return the seized documents
“Oh great! It has just been learned that the FBI, in its now famous raid of Mar-a-Lago, took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken,” he wrote on his Truth Social site.