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Prosecutors said the former president made “extremely misleading” claims about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago that could endanger the agents involved.
By Alan Feuer
Federal prosecutors asked late Friday for sentencing in the case of classified documents of former President Donald J. Trump to prohibit him from making statements that could endanger law enforcement officials involved in the process.
Prosecutors filed the request after Trump made claims they called “grossly misleading” about the August 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, his personal club and Florida residence. This week, the former president falsely warned that the FBI was legal to shoot him when officials discovered more than a hundred classified documents while executing a court-approved search warrant.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Trump falsely claimed that President Biden “authorized the FBI to use deadly force” in the search.
Trump’s message came as a reaction to an FBI report. The operational plan for the search for Mar-a-Lago that was unsealed Tuesday as part of a lawsuit filed by Mr. The plan contained a repetitive reference to authorizing deadly force in an emergency, prosecutors said. Mr. Trump had seriously distorted it.
“As Trump well knows, the FBI took the usual care to execute the search warrant discreetly and without unnecessary confrontation,” prosecutors wrote in a letter to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who oversees the classified documents case.
“They scheduled the search for Mar-a-Lago at a time when he and his circle of family members would be absent,” prosecutors added. “They planned to coordinate with Trump’s lawyer, Secret Service agents, and Mar-a-Lago staff prior to and execution of the warrant; and they planned contingencies (which, in fact, never happened) to know who to touch if Trump arrived on the scene.
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