On Monday, former United States president Donald Trump revealed that his Mar-a-Lago residence was being raided by federal police.
"These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before," Mr Trump said online.
The former president described the "unannounced raid" as "prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections".
While the FBI and Department of Justice are yet to comment on the raid, it has been met with outrage from Republicans.
Former vice-president Mike Pence has demanded the federal attorney-general provide “a full accounting” of why the raid was conducted.
"No former President of the United States has ever been subject to a raid of their personal residence in American history," Mr Pence wrote on Twitter.
Mr Trump’s family said he had been cooperating with the investigation.
The raid has fuelled speculation around a potential bid for the US presidency in 2024 by Mr Trump, with the former president releasing a campaign-style video after news broke.
"There is no mountain we cannot climb, there is no summit we cannot reach, there is no challenge we cannot meet," Mr Trump said in the video.
‘Whatever it is, it's pretty damn secret’: What we know about the Mar-a-Lago raid
Reports suggest the raid is related to Mr Trump removing classified documents from the White House and taking them to his private residence.
It has previously been revealed that Mr Trump took 15 boxes of material when he left office in January 2021, with the boxes returned to the National Archives in January 2022.
David Smith, an associate professor in American politics and foreign policy at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre, said it was possible Mr Trump had broken US law.
“Under US law, any document that's generated by the presidency has to be turned over to the National Archives. That's a really important part of the transparency of government. So if that is the case, it's entirely possible that he's broken federal law,” said Dr Smith.
“There certainly was talk that Trump had taken classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago, which is certainly very illegal because they could potentially compromise US intelligence, they could compromise US intelligence agents. But we don't really know exactly what they're looking for.”
Australian National University political scientist Charles Miller said the FBI’s use of a search warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago rather than merely issuing a subpoena to request the items be handed over was “unprecedented”.
“A search warrant basically says, ‘Okay, this individual has these items, which we need for judicial processes, and we don't trust them to give them to us. And so therefore, we're just gonna go and get them’”, Dr Miller explained.
“It suggests a very low degree of trust that both the FBI, and the judges [who would have had to approve the search warrant] had in Donald Trump's willingness to cooperate with the investigation.”
Dr Miller said it’s unlikely the public will know what exactly the FBI was searching for for “a very long time”, perhaps decades, given “some of those documents are so sensitive and so confidential”.
The documents in question are “so sensitive that the National Archives can't even describe them in the vaguest terms without breaching national security legislation”, he said.
“So whatever it is, it's pretty damn secret.”
The political fallout
Dr Miller said the political fallout from the raids has been “quite predictable” on both sides.
“Democrats are saying that this is one more strike against Donald Trump, another item on the ‘rap sheet’ against him,” he said.
On the Republican side, many in the media and the party’s base are “saying that this is a politicised investigation, that they’re trumped-up charges … essentially that this is an abuse of power by the FBI”, Dr Miller said.
“The Trump base are basically buying this as they bought into the rationalisations for the other pieces of [Mr Trump’s] behaviour over the last few years. So I don't actually think that this is really going to change very much,” he said.
Former US president Donald Trump. Source: AAP
Dr Smith said the FBI and federal justice department “would have known that to Trump supporters [the raid] really looks like a very aggressive act, and it leaves them open to the accusation that they've been politicised”.
“They must think that there's something pretty serious there if they're prepared to escalate the drama this much,” he said.
Will the FBI raid help or hurt Donald Trump’s 2024 chances?
When it comes to Mr Trump’s potential tilt at the presidency in 2024, Dr Miller said the FBI raid is unlikely to be “a scandal that finally torpedoes Donald Trump's political ambitions”.
While it’s still not certain whether he’ll run, Mr Trump remains the “heavy favourite” to win the Republican nomination if he does, despite “some signs of lessening in support” since the investigation into .
Scandals ranging from to “the January 6 events themselves” all failed to “break the spell that Trump had on his base”, Dr Miller said.
“So I'm not holding my breath at this time will be any different to the previous times,” he said.
The two things that could potentially “stop Donald Trump in 2024” would be “an improvement in the American economy and a really well organised, concerted drive by the Democrats to mobilise their voters, get them out to vote, and combat voter suppression efforts on the part of the Republicans”, Dr Miller said.
“I don't think that waiting for some scandal to finally torpedo Donald Trump's chances is really going to work.”
Dr Smith said the FBI's raid was unlike anything we've seen "in living memory”.
The crime of mishandling federal documents can lead to a multi-year prison sentence, and there has been speculation in recent days over whether Mr Trump could be prevented from running for office again if he were to be charged with a criminal offence.
However, since it’s ultimately the constitution that governs the eligibility of someone to be President of the United States, not criminal law, being criminally investigated likely wouldn’t stop Mr Trump from running for office again, according to Dr Smith.
“Nonetheless, when you’ve got this kind of investigation going on, that can definitely hurt a candidate politically,” he said.
“As much as it might help rally Republicans around Trump … for the rest of the country, having someone under criminal investigation, they're not going to think of him as a good candidate for president.”
