When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s house on Monday of last week, his supporters within the Republican Party began to demand the annulment of the seizure of seized documents and the resignation of judicial authorities. And they accused the White House of being behind the operation for political reasons.
But as the days passed and it became known that highly classified materials were found among the documents, either related to nuclear plans or to the military apparatus, doubts have begun to emerge about the innocence that the former president maintains.
In the immediate aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago incident, Republicans in Congress, including members of the leadership, reacted furiously, attacking the nation’s top law enforcement agencies. Some made calls to “defund” or “destroy” the FBI; others invoked the Nazi secret police using words like “gestapo” and “tyrants.”
More moderate voices in the Republican Party on Sunday chided their colleagues for the broadsides against law enforcement, presenting a more measured case for defending Trump while also overseeing the Justice Department.
Many Republicans called for the release of the affidavit supporting the search warrant executed last Monday, the document that served as the basis for a federal judge to sign the search warrant. This document would detail the evidence that the authorities have to get into Trump’s house. Normally these documents are not made public before charges are filed.
“It was an unprecedented action that must be backed by unprecedented justification,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican and former FBI agent, told CBS. “I have urged all my colleagues to make sure they understand the weight of their words.”
Calls for a more cautious tone emerged as threats against law enforcement began. A gunman attacked an FBI office in Cincinnati on Thursday, and on Friday the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) distributed an intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies across the country warning of “an increase in threats and acts of violence, including armed confrontations, against police, judicial and government personnel.
“The FBI and DHS have noted an increase in violent threats posted on social media against federal officials and facilities, including a threat to plant a suspected dirty bomb outside Washington headquarters and issuing blanket calls for ‘civil war’ and the ‘armed rebellion’”, says the bulletin revealed by The New York Times.
Another gunman crashed a car into a barricade outside the Capitol around 4 am Sunday. After getting out of the car, he fired several shots into the air before killing himself, Capitol Police said.
Fitzpatrick told CBS that he had begun contacting his former colleagues at the FBI “to make sure they were okay.”
Conservative lawyer declares Trump at “substantial legal risk”
“We are the oldest democracy in the world, and the only way it can fall apart is by disrespecting institutions and turning Americans against each other,” he said. And he added: “That starts, to a large extent, with the words that we are using.”.
Republicans struggled to come together around a unified strategy to respond to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, amid daily revelations and false explanations, excuses, defenses and accusations. that change quickly.
Trump and his allies have argued that former President Barack Obama also mishandled the documents, but the allegation was quickly dismissed as false by the National Archives.
They have also accused the judge who signed the warrant authorizing the search of being biased, that the FBI might have planted evidence, that the documents were covered by attorney-client or executive privilege, and that Trump had declassified the documents.
On Saturday, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, called for the repeal of the Espionage Act, one of the legal supports that prompted the investigation.
But these explanations have made it difficult for Republicans, many eager to please the former president, to come together in a unified defense. They are divided on whether to target the country’s top law enforcement agencies and how aggressive they should be in those attacks.
