Former President Donald Trump.
James Devaney/GC Images
Trump complained about the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago investigation in a Truth Social post.
He accused agents of trying to make him look bad in a photograph it submitted as evidence.
But in doing so, he appeared to undercut his earlier claim that the FBI planted evidence.
Former President Donald Trump appeared to undermine his suggestion that the FBI planted evidence during its Mar-a-Lago raid in a new post on his Truth Social network.
In the Wednesday post, Trump claimed that the FBI had deliberately arranged highly classified documents on the floor of a room in Mar-a-Lago in a bid to make him look bad. He was referring to a photo that was submitted as evidence in a Tuesday Justice Department court filing.
Image contained in a court filing by the Department of Justice on Aug. 30, 2022, and redacted by in part by the FBI, of documents seized during the Aug. 8 search by the FBI of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Department of Justice via AP
“There seems to be confusion as to the ‘picture’ where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my home,” Trump wrote. “Wrong!”
“They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big “find” for them. They dropped them, not me – Very deceiving…And remember, we could have NO representative, including lawyers, present during the Raid. They were told to wait outside.”
Trump, notably, did not dispute that the documents photographed by the FBI, including those among the highest levels of classification, had been in his possession.
Missing from his claims was his earlier allegation that the FBI planted evidence during the August 8 search, when agents retrieved stashes of highly classified information they believe he wrongly took to his Florida resort after leaving the White House.
That claim was also not mentioned in a legal filing from the Trump team Tuesday as part of Trump’s bid to have a special master appointed to review the documents.
In the immediate aftermath of the raid, Trump had claimed that his lawyers were been allowed to observe the search. “Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be alone,” he wrote on Truth Social on August 10, “without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.'”
Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official who wrote critical anonymous op-eds about Trump while he was in office, pointed out the former president’s shifting account of the raid on Twitter.
“Trump’s argument has gone from ‘The FBI planted evidence against me!” to “They took the evidence out of my cartons — and spread it on my carpet!'” he tweeted.
Trump’s claim that the FBI planted evidence may have been a bid to rile up his base, who have long believed that there is a “deep state” in the US determined to take Trump down. Experts told Bloomberg that the claim would be highly unlikely to stand up should the case come to court.
Trump has given a range of defenses in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago search, including claiming that documents had been broadly declassified by him before leaving office, and attempting to portray the search as politically motivated.