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Former President Donald J. Trump said Monday that the FBI searched his home in Palm Beach, Florida, and broke into a safe, an account that signaled a major escalation in the various investigations in the final stages of his presidency.
The search, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material Mr. Trump brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, when he left the White House. Those boxes contain many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents.
Mr. Trump delayed the return of 15 boxes of materials requested by National Archives officials for many months, only doing so when there was a threat of action to retrieve them. The case was referred to the Department of Justice from the archives earlier this year.
The search marks the latest notable twist in years-long investigations into Mr. Trump’s actions before, during and after his presidency — and even as he announces another bid for the White House.
It came as the Justice Department stepped up its separate investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in office after his 2020 election defeat, and as the former president also faces an accelerating criminal investigation in Georgia and civil suits in New York .
Mr. Trump has long portrayed the FBI as a tool of Democrats seeking to capture him, and the search has sparked a furious backlash among his supporters in the Republican Party and on the far right of American politics. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, has suggested he intends to investigate Attorney General Merrick B. Garland if Republicans take control of the House in November.
The FBI had to convince a judge that there was probable cause that a crime had been committed and that agents could find evidence at Mar-a-Lago in order to obtain a search warrant. Proceeding with a search of a former president’s home would almost certainly require approval from senior officials in the Bureau and the Department of Justice.
However, the search does not mean that prosecutors have found that Mr. Trump committed a crime.
An FBI representative declined to comment, as did Justice Department officials. The director of the FBI, Christopher A. Wray, was appointed by Mr. Trump.
Mr Trump was in the New York area at the time of the search. “Another day in paradise,” he said Monday night during a phone rally for Sarah Palin, who is running for a congressional seat from Alaska.
Eric Trump, one of his sons, told Fox News that he was the one who informed his father that the search was taking place, and he said the search warrant was related to presidential documents.
Mr. Trump, who campaigned for president in 2016 criticizing Hillary Clinton’s practice of maintaining a private email server for government-related communications while she was secretary of state, has been known throughout his tenure to rip off official materials intended to be retained for presidential archives. A person familiar with his habits said it included classified materials that were cut in his bedroom and elsewhere.
The search was at least partly about whether there were any records left at the club, a person familiar with the matter said. That happened Monday morning, the person said, although Mr. Trump said agents were still there many hours later.
“After working and cooperating with the appropriate government agencies, this unannounced attack on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Mr. Trump said, maintaining that it was an effort to stop him from running for president in 2024. Such an attack can only take place in broken countries of the Third World.
“They even broke into my safe!” he wrote.
Mr. Trump did not share details of what FBI agents said they were looking for.
Aides to President Biden said they were stunned by the development and learned of it on Twitter.
The search came as the Justice Department also stepped up questioning of former Trump aides who witnessed White House discussions and planning of Mr. Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss.
Mr. Trump has been the focus of questions from federal prosecutors about a scheme to send “fake” voters to Congress to certify the Electoral College. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is also continuing its work and interviewing witnesses this week.
The law governing the preservation of White House materials, the Presidential Records Act, has no teeth, but criminal laws can come into play, especially in the case of classified material.
The penal codes, which provide for imprisonment, can be used to prosecute anyone who “willfully injures or commits any robbery of property of the United States” and anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys ” state documents.
Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, pleaded guilty in 2015 to a felony charge of removing classified material from a government archive. In 2007, Donald Keyser, an Asia expert and former senior State Department official, was sentenced to prison after admitting to storing more than 3,000 sensitive documents – from classified to top secret – in his basement.
In 1999, the CIA announced that it had suspended the security clearance of its former director, John M. Deutsch, after concluding that he had mishandled national secrets on a desktop computer in his home.
In January of this year, the archives removed 15 boxes that Mr. Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago from the White House residence when his term ended. The boxes contained material subject to the Presidential Records Act, which requires all documents and records related to official business to be turned over to the archives.
Items in the boxes included documents, memorabilia, gifts and letters. The archives did not describe the classified material they found, other than to say it was “classified national security information.”
As the National Archives “identified classified information in the boxes,” the agency “communicated with the Department of Justice,” David S. Ferriero, the National Archivist, told Congress at the time.
Federal prosecutors subsequently opened a grand jury investigation, according to two people briefed on the matter. Earlier this year, prosecutors subpoenaed the archives to obtain the boxes of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
Authorities have also made interview requests with people who worked at the White House in the final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency, according to one of the people.
In the spring, a small group of federal agents visited Mar-a-Lago in search of some documents, according to a person familiar with the meeting. At least one of the agents was involved in counterintelligence, according to the person.
The question of how Mr. Trump handled sensitive materials and documents he received as president has been raised throughout his time in the White House and beyond.
He has been known to tear pieces of official documents handed to him, forcing officials to glue them back. And a forthcoming book by a New York Times reporter reveals that staff members would find wads of torn paper clogging a toilet and believe he had thrown them inside.
The question of how Mr. Trump handled classified material is complicated because, as president, he had the power to declassify any government information. It is not clear whether Mr. Trump, before leaving office, declassified the materials found in the archives in the boxes. Under federal law, he no longer maintains the ability to declassify documents after leaving office.
While in office, he invoked the declassification authority several times as his administration publicly released material that helped him politically, particularly on issues such as the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.
Toward the end of the administration, Mr. Trump plucked photos that intrigued him from the president’s daily briefing — a compendium of often-classified information about potential national security threats — but it’s unclear whether he took them into the residence with him. In one major example of how he handled classified material, Mr Trump in 2019 took a top-secret spy satellite image of an Iranian missile launch site, declassified it and then tweeted the image.
Earlier this year, Kash Patel, a former senior Defense Department official and Trump loyalist whom Mr. Trump has named as one of his spokespeople for engaging with the National Archives, suggested to the right-wing website Breitbart that Mr. Trump had leaked documents prior to this departure from the White House and that the correct markings were simply not corrected.
“Trump declassified entire reams of material in anticipation of leaving the government that he thought the American public should have the right to read for themselves,” he said, according to Breitbart.
Local television crews showed Mr. Trump’s supporters gathering near Mar-a-Lago, some of them aggressive toward reporters.
Mr. Trump made it clear in his statement that he saw potential political value in the search, something some of his advisers echoed, depending on the outcome of any investigation.
His political team began sending out fundraising appeals for the search late Monday night.
Jonathan Martin, Luke Broadwater and Glen Thrush contributed reporting.
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