Former President Donald Trump is prepared to sue the Department of Justice for $100 million in damages that were sustained during the 2022 raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump and his legal team claim that the raid was a weaponization of the federal government to interfere with his presidential bid in the 2024 election.
Trump’s legal team has threatened the Justice Department with legal action over the incident on August 8, 2022, stemming from allegations that the former president mishandled classified documents. Following the raid, Special Counsel Jack Smith was appointed to investigate Trump, resulting in 37 felony charges.
Daniel Epstein, Trump’s lawyer and vice president of the conservative law group America First Legal, told Fox News, “What President Trump is doing here is not just standing up for himself – he is standing up for all Americans who believe in the rule of law and believe that you should hold the government accountable when it wrongs you.”
Epstein, who formerly served as an assistant to former President Trump, emphasized that Trump believes the raid was designed to obstruct his election efforts. “That’s what President Trump believes the entire special counsel investigation was about, interfering with his ability to get elected,” Epstein said, outlining Trump’s opinion.
The Trump lawyer also criticized Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray over what he describes as a “clear dereliction of constitutional principles, inconsistent standards as applied to” Trump and a “clear intent to engage in political persecution – not to advance good law enforcement practices.”
However, the FBI has maintained that it followed established procedures in the raid. “The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force. No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter,” per the bureau.
Epstein argued that the bureaucratic leaders should never have allowed the raid to occur in the first place.”Garland and Wray should have never approved a raid and subsequent indictment of President Trump because the well-established protocol with former U.S. presidents is to use non-enforcement means to obtain records of the United States,” he said. “But notwithstanding the fact that the raid should have never occurred, Garland and Wray should have ensured their agents sought consent from President Trump, notified his lawyers, and sought cooperation.”
Epstein further claimed, “You have clear evidence that the FBI failed to follow protocols, and the failure to follow protocols shows that there was an improper purpose. If the government is able to say, well, we don’t like someone, we can raid their home, we can violate their privacy, we can breach protocols when we decide to prosecute them, we can use the process to advance our personal motive–not a motive of justice–if someone doesn’t stand against that in a very public way and seek to obtain and protect their rights, then the government will have a mandate to roughshod over every American.”
Watch Trump lawyer Alina Habba sound off on Vice President Kamala Harris:
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