Trump Blasts Mar-a-Lago Raid as ‘Demented Persecution’ of Himself and His Supporters
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Former president Donald Trump told thousands of supporters Saturday that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was an attack on them as much as it was on him, saying it was a “demented persecution of you and me.”
“They’re trying to silence me and more importantly, they are trying to silence you. But we will not be silenced, right?” Trump said at a rally for Congressional candidate Mehmet Oz at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania — the first since the Mar-a-Lago search on August 8.
“We will never stop speaking the truth. We have no choice because we’re not going to have a country love. The evil and malice of this demented persecution of you and me should be obvious to all entities,” Trump added, calling the raid “a desperate effort to distract from Joe Biden’s record of misery and failure.”
The former president also mentioned alleged details of the FBI’s raid on the Florida residence, claiming that they went through his family’s personal items and that the “FBI and the Justice Department have become vicious monsters.”
“They rifled through the first lady’s closet drawers and everything else, and even did a deep and ugly search of the room of my 16-year-old son, leaving everything they touched in far different conditions than it was when they started,” Trump said.
On Friday, a federal judge unsealed a more detailed inventory of what the FBI seized from the property, showing that hundreds of articles of “magazine/newspapers/press articles and other printed media,” several hundreds U.S. government documents, empty folders with classification markings, books, and items labeled “clothing/gift” were taken both from Trump’s office and storage room.
Investigators thought Trump and his associates had hidden classified items throughout Mar-a-Lago, despite claiming to have returned such materials to the government, a court filing from the Justice Department showed.
Trump also spoke about President Joe Biden’s prime-time speech calling MAGA Republicans “extreme.”
“This week Joe Biden came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to give the most vicious, hateful and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president, vilifying 75 million citizens, plus another probably 75 to 150,” Trump said, calling the red lighting behind Biden during his speech “like the devil.”
He added that Biden is an “enemy of the state,” not MAGA Republicans.
“If we want to be accurate about it, as threats to democracy and as enemies of the state, you’re all enemies of the state. He’s an enemy of the state, you know that? The enemy of the state is him and the group that control him, which is circling around him, ‘Do this. do that Joe, you’re going to do this Joe,'” Trump said.
