Trump melts down on Truth Social and attacks FBI over Mar-a-Lago

Donald Trump is turning to his Truth Social feed as the last reliable place where his conspiracies about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago can go unchallenged.

The ex-president let loose a series of memes, “retruths”, and otherwise angry statements over Monday night as he continues to stew over the ongoing criminal investigation into his handling of classified materials.

“Presidential Records Act was fully adhered to by me, but not by the FBI. They RAIDED my home (4th Amendment anyone?). Agent In Charge was just walked out of the FBI Headquarters Building for wrongdoing. He was also involved with the 2020 Election Hoax, the Crime of the Century!!!” he wrote in one rambling statement just after 8am after a long series of “retruths” of memes from his fans.

The statement is packed to the limit with nonsense; the agent to whom Mr Trump is apparently referring, Timothy Thibault, was not “just walked out of the FBI Headquarters Building for wrongdoing” — he retired, and was escorted out as is typical policy. He also, crucially, has not been accused of wrongdoing by anyone besides Mr Trump’s supporters. Mr Trump would again go on to wrongly refer to him as “fired” in another post.

In addition to his quibble about the “agent in charge”, which is largely meaningless in terms of the overall investigation, the president’s statement also falsely claims that he adhered to the Presidential Records Act, which at a bare minimum would have required any of these documents to have been first returned to the National Archives instead of being stored at Mar-a-Lago.

Mr Trump’s increasingly scattered response to the FBI search of his home comes as it has been reported that he has had difficulty in finding experienced lawyers to help him with his latest legal problems. That may be a result of the legal consequences faced by Rudy Giuliani and other members of Mr Trump’s team of attorneys who worked with him in the days after the 2020 election.

The president has yet to explain why he had documents against the wishes of the National Archives including classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago home, other than to denounce stories about it in the mainstream press as “fake news” despite admitting to the basis of their factual assertions.

He continues to center most of his criticism on the FBI, blaming what he depicts as a corrupt law enforcement agency that violated the law to target him for political reasons. The Justice Department and FBI strongly refute that claim, and Attorney General Merrick Garland as well as President Joe Biden stress that there is no contact on the matter between the DoJ and White House.

Meanwhile, his Republican allies have joined him in spreading conspiracy theories as well as latching on to the idea that the FBI is corrupt and politically compromised. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has vowed that the lower chamber will launch investigations of the search should the GOP retake the House in November, while Minority Whip Steve Scalise even suggested on Fox News (before being publicly refuted by Attorney General Merrick Garland) that “rogue” agents may have been involved in the raid.