Trump declares himself ‘as innocent as a person can be’ in Truth Social rant on FBI raid

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Former president Donald Trump declared himself “as innocent as a person can be” in a Thursday rant after the FBI raided his home earlier this month.

Mr Trump made the remarks on his networking platform Truth Social on Thursday, where he spouted off many tidbits of right-wing talking points and outright misinformation.

“Even though I am as innocent as a person can be, and despite MY campaign being spied on by the Radical Left, the FISA COURT being lied to and defrauded, all of the many Hoaxes and Scams that were illegally placed on my by very sick & demented people, and without even mentioning the many crimes of Joe and Hunter Biden, all revealed in great detail in the Laptop From Hell, it looks more and more like the Fake News Media is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done,” he said.

The former president also criticised President Joe Biden, who said on Wednesday that he had “not one single bit” of advance notice about the search on Mar-a-Lago.

“Does anyone really believe this,” Mr Trump posted.

The New York Times reported earlier this week that the former president kept more than 300 classified documents at his home at Mar-a-Lago, which prompted the FBI to execute a search warrant on the estate in Palm Beach Florida.

A 10 May letter from the National Archives and Records Administration released showed that Mr Trump’s attorneys never claimed that the former president declassified any of the documents the FBI retrieved at his home.

The letter to one of the president’s lawyers, M Evan Corcoran, revealed that on 12 April, Mr Trump’s attorneys sent a letter asking the Biden administration to inspect the records contained in the 15 boxes that officials picked up from Mar-a-Lago. They also tried to delay the FBI access to boxes for an Intelligence Community review, with Mr Corcoran saying Mr Trump would be making a “protective assertion of executive privilege” if they did not received the delay.

Mr Trump’s team also sued the FBI, requesting a third party known as a “special master” to review the documents and determine whether any of them should be returned to the former president.

-Andrew Feinberg contributed to this report.