By The legal team of the former US President, Donald Trump, has described the pursuit of classified documents at his home by the Jos Biden administration as “unjustified”.
On August 8, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reportedly raided Trump’s Florida home over allegations that he removed classified records from the White House before leaving office in 2020.
The ex-president had, in a statement, described the raid as a weaponisation of the US justice system.
In a bombshell filing, the US Department of Justice said top secret documents were “likely concealed” at Trump’s estate to obstruct an FBI probe, AFP reported.
But his legal team, on Wednesday, said the raid was legally dubious and unnecessary, insisting that his possession of sensitive information should have come as no surprise.
“The purported justification for the initiation of this criminal probe was the alleged discovery of sensitive information contained within the 15 boxes of presidential records,” his attorneys said in a court filing.
“But this ‘discovery’ was to be fully anticipated given the very nature of presidential records. Simply put, the notion that presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been caused for alarm.”
Trump’s lawyers repeated their call for an independent review of all material seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate and described the August 8 FBI raid on the property as “unprecedented, unnecessary, and legally unsupported.”
The legal team also condemned the inclusion of a photograph of colour-coded documents spread out over a carpet, marked “SECRET” and “TOP SECRET” in the department’s filing.
