The former head of the FBI Minneapolis Field Office said the bureau’s decision to raid former President Donald Trump’s Florida home Monday evening is “unprecedented” and the “political sensitivities” are clear given that Trump has indicated he plans to run for president again in 2024.
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“We just haven’t investigated presidents after they’ve served their term,” Michael Tabman told Fox News on Monday. “But it is a huge move by the FBI in that the political sensitivities are clear. It’s obvious that they’re dealing on a very, sort of tenuous political climate when you go out and you investigate a president, especially one who says he may run for office again.”
In a statement posted on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump announced on Monday that his Mar-A-Lago resort was “under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.” Trump went on to say FBI agents “even broke into my safe” during the raid.
Sources told Fox that the search involved classified materials Trump took with him when his first term ended in Jan. 2021.
Tabman said getting a search warrant “is no minor task.”
“You have to certainly, as most people know, produce probable cause … to first get prosecutors who want to write this and present it to a judge – and then present it to a judge who has to agree that you have shown probable cause that a crime has been committed, there is evidence of the crime in the location that you state and at the time you plan to execute the warrant,” he said. “So, there’s a lot of information that you have to be very convincing of to a federal judge and they scrutinize these.”
Tabman indicated that a search warrant could be politicized, arguing any system “can be corrupted,” but noted that the search warrant affidavit will likely be public at some point due to the gravity of the raid.
“You can seal a search warrant for a time. I’ve done that myself, sealed a search warrant for various reasons having to do with the security of the case,” he added. “But it will become public, as will the return, which is what they found. So, the affidavit will be laid bare.”
“In order for this to really be political, there [will] have to be corruption at every level along the way, which I just don’t think exists,” he concluded.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who also previously served as Trump’s attorney, told Newsmax that Monday’s FBI raid is “probably the worst day” in FBI history.
“We’ve done nothing about the FBI, and for three years, they’ve been acting like the state police rather than the FBI, and now the Biden state police,” Giuliani said. “This is an outrageous act. It’s a disgrace.”
Giuliani said he wasn’t surprised that an FBI raid against Trump would occur with leadership like Director Chris Wray, who Giuliani noted “hid” the Hunter Biden laptop hard drive “for a year and a half.”
“The hard drive contains evidence that the president of the United States, that his family, got $31 million from China, our biggest enemy, and nobody cares that he may be compromised,” Giuliani said. “He acts like he’s compromised. He gave up an air base 400 miles from China, and he got $31 million from China.”
“Nobody raids his home,” Giuliani continued. “Nobody raided Joe Biden when he was involved in a $3.1 million money-laundering scheme with Ukraine. That’s on paper … there are crimes on that hard drive that prove that the Biden family is a racketeering family.”
“[Trump] said the other night, you know, sort of joking like, that he was persecuted. He’s right, and to think of what you accomplished, but what they did to him and where we are now with this,” he later added.
