Those statements reflect a strategy Mr. Trump has long used to deal with controversy, alternating between denying any wrongdoing while deflecting attention. Some of the messages also reflect his penchant for making false and misleading claims. Here are some of the false and unsupported statements he has made following the FBI investigation. Monday and Tuesday August 8 and 9
After the investigation became public, Trump suggested, without evidence, that Biden played a role.
In the days following the investigation, Mr. Trump’s allies focused attention on the FBI’s search warrant for his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. Those warrants typically remain sealed unless charges are filed, but many of his supporters suggested the FBI didn’t release them because the investigation was politically motivated. Mr. Trump was free to issue the warrant at any time. Instead, he repeatedly linked the White House to the investigation, implying that President Biden or other Democrats knew about it. “Biden knew all this,” he wrote on August 9. He did not provide evidence. Karine Jean-Pierre, a White House press secretary, said President Biden was not notified in advance of the investigation.
More coverage of the FBI investigation into Trump’s home
Wednesday, August 10
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 authorized to monitor the investigation and suggested a lack of oversight could have allowed the FBI to build evidence. He wrote to Truth Social that agents 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 investigation from New York on video provided by security cameras inside Mar-a-Lago. Mr Trump also took aim at former President Barack Obama, falsely claiming his predecessor moved more than 30 million documents to Chicago after leaving the White House. In a later post, Mr Trump increased the number 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, August 11
After reports reveal focus on classified documents, Trump suggests investigation was unnecessary.
After reports showed the FBI sought documents related to “special access programs,” a term reserved for highly sensitive businesses and technologies, Mr. Trump said the FBI could have requested documents without an investigation. 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 attorneys and representatives have been fully cooperative and a very good relationship has been established,” he wrote on Aug. 11. “The government could have whatever it wanted if we had it.” Mr. Trump received a subpoena this spring seeking additional documents, and federal officials met with Mr. Trump and his lawyer, Evan Corcoran, at Mar-a-Lago. After the visit, at least one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers signed a written statement claiming that all material marked classified and stored in boxes at Mar-a-Lago had been returned. But an inventory of material taken from Mr. Trump’s home during last week’s search showed that agents seized 11 sets of confidential or classified documents. Friday, August 12
After the FBI’s log of seized documents shows some marked classified, Trump says, without evidence, that the documents were already declassified.
After the warrant was released by a Florida court, an accompanying log showed that 11 sets of classified documents were recovered from Mar-a-Lago. The warrant also indicated that the search was related to violations of the Espionage Act. Mr Trump then suggested the documents seized by the FBI were legitimate. “Number one, everything is declassified,” he wrote. While presidents have broad powers to declassify information while in office, Espionage Act violations still apply to declassified documents. Saturday and Sunday August 13 and 14
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 being corrupt”. He made discredited allegations of election interference during the 2016 elections. Mr Trump then returned to his earlier, unsubstantiated, claims that the documents could have been planted by the FBI “There was no way of knowing if what they got was legal or if there was some ‘plant?’” he wrote. “This was the FBI after all!”
