In the days since former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home was searched by federal agents last week, he has posted dozens of messages on his social media platform Truth Social, about the Democrats, the FBI and other alleged enemies.
Those statements reflect the strategy Mr. Trump has long used to deal with controversy, by alternately denying any wrongdoing and focusing attention elsewhere. Some posts also reflect his penchant for false and misleading claims.
Here are some of the false and unsupported statements he has made since the FBI’s search.
Monday and Tuesday 8 and 9 Aug
After the search went public, Trump suggests, without evidence, that Biden played a role.
In the days following the search, Mr Trump’s allies focused attention on the FBI’s search warrant for his home in the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. Those warrants typically remain sealed unless charges are filed, but many of his supporters suggested that the FBI didn’t release it because the search was… politically motivated.
Mr Trump was free to release the warrant at any time. Instead, he repeatedly linked the White House to the search, suggesting President Biden or other Democrats knew about it.
“Biden knew all about this,” he wrote on Aug. 9. He provided no proof.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Biden had not been given advance notice of the search.
More coverage of the FBI search into Trump’s home
Wednesday 10 Aug.
Trump suggests, without evidence, that the FBI may have planted evidence. He then makes false claims about Obama.
Mr Trump said his lawyers and others at Mar-a-Lago were not allowed to view the search, and suggested that the lack of oversight could have allowed the FBI to gather evidence.
He wrote on Truth Social that officers didn’t want witnesses to “see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting'”.
But Mr Trump’s lawyer said during a television interview that the former president watched the search from New York on video from security cameras in Mar-a-Lago.
Mr Trump also targeted former President Barack Obama, falsely claiming that his predecessor took more than 30 million documents to Chicago after he left the White House. In a later post, Mr. Trump increased the figure 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 maintained exclusively by NARA.”
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Thursday 11 Aug.
After reports reveal a focus on classified documents, Trump suggests the search was unnecessary.
After reports showed the FBI was seeking documents related to “special access programs,” a term reserved for extremely sensitive operations and meticulous technologies, Mr. Trump said the FBI could have asked for documents without a search.
He posted on Truth Social that the FBI had already asked him to install an additional padlock in an area where secure documents were kept.
“My lawyers and representatives cooperated fully and very good relations had been established,” he wrote on August 11. “The government could have gotten what they wanted if we had it.”
Mr. Trump received a subpoena this spring requesting additional documents, and federal officials met with Mr. Trump and his attorney Evan Corcoran in Mar-a-Lago. After the visit, at least one of Mr. Trump’s attorneys signed a written statement claiming that all material marked as classified and stored in boxes at Mar-a-Lago had been returned.
But an inventory of material recovered from Mr. Trump’s home during Mr. Trump’s search last week, revealed that agents seized 11 sets of confidential or classified documents.
friday 12 aug
After the FBI’s log of seized documents shows some marked documents, Trump says, with no evidence, that the documents had already been released.
After the warrant was released by a Florida court, an accompanying log showed that 11 sets of classified documents had been retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. The arrest warrant also revealed that the investigation related to violations of the Espionage Act.
Mr Trump then suggested that the documents seized by the FBI were legitimate.
“Number one, it was all released,” he wrote.
While presidents have broad powers to release information while in office, violations of the Espionage Act still apply to declassified documents.
Saturday and Sunday 13 and 14 Aug.
Trump repeats baseless claim that documents could 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 mentioned discredited claims of election meddling during the 2016 election.
Mr Trump then went back to his previous, unsupported, claims that the documents could have been planted by the FBI
“There was no way of knowing if what they were taking was legit, or was there a ‘plant?'” he wrote. “This was the FBI, after all!”
