Chris Lange, FISM News
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Former President Trump said he “will do whatever” he can to help defuse escalating tensions over last week’s FBI raid on his Florida residence, even offering to assist the Bureau as it investigates purported threats by angry Trump supporters.
Trump said the “temperature has to be brought down” while at the same time suggesting that the outrage felt by his supporters is a direct response to the ongoing “witch hunt” against him by his opponents, according to an exclusive Fox News report.
“The country is in a very dangerous position. There is tremendous anger like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one — years of scams and witch hunts, and now this,” Trump said.
Despite Trump’s personal frustrations with the DOJ and FBI, he offered his assistance in helping avert threats against the agencies. “If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that,” Trump said.
Trump’s call for calm comes as the Department of Homeland Security and FBI report an increase in threats against law enforcement officials in the aftermath of the unprecedented raid on a former president’s personal residence.
One Pennsylvania man was charged yesterday with making death threats to the FBI. Adam Bies, 46, was arrested late Monday and charged with influencing, impeding, or retaliating against a federal law enforcement official, according to an FBI affidavit. Bies allegedly wrote that he would “slaughter” as many agents as he could “before I drop,” comparing the FBI to Nazis and the KGB.
Another man died in an apparent suicide on Sunday after crashing his car into a barricade near the U.S. Capitol and firing shots indiscriminately, though his motives remain unclear. Capitol Police identified the man as Richard A. York III, 29, of Delaware in a press release on Tuesday but said it’s “still not clear why he chose to drive to the Capitol Complex.” The statement previously noted that “at this time, it does not appear the man was targeting any Members of Congress, who are on recess, and it does not appear officers fired their weapons.”
Whatever the man’s motives, the incident added to rising tensions over the Mar-a-Lago raid, during which 30 agents seized around 20 boxes of documents, claiming they contained classified material — a claim Trump has denied.
Trump told Fox that the Justice Department has not responded to his offer of assistance.
“There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country — at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times,” Trump continued.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is asking a Florida judge to keep the affidavit used in the FBI’s raid on former President Trump’s home sealed just days after Attorney General Merrick Garland said the warrant should be unsealed as he touted transparency in the matter.
The DOJ also denied a request from Trump’s attorneys seeking an independent review of the documents that were seized in the raid, according to Newsmax, even though doing so could potentially diminish perceptions that the raid was politically motivated.
HotAir reported Tuesday that the FBI returned Trump’s passports after denying that they were taken in the raid. No explanation was given as to why they were seized. The article points out that the passports were omitted from the Bureau’s inventory list of what was taken from Mar-a-Lago.
In another development, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan request for more information on the raid. In a letter reported by Axios, committee chair Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called on Attorney General Garland and National Intelligence Director Avril Haines to provide a classified briefing on the documents seized in the search along with an assessment of the specific national security risks tied to any mishandling of those documents.
“The Senate Intelligence Committee is charged with overseeing counterintelligence matters, including the handling and mishandling of classified information, which appears to be at the core of the search of Mar-a-Lago,” a committee spokesperson told Axios.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), also a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, backed the move in a statement, saying the public deserves “a full accounting of the extraordinary action taken by the FBI last week.”
The request is another “first” following the raid of a former president’s home, marking the only bipartisan effort to provide oversight of an FBI decision.