By Stacy M. Brown | NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
(NNPA) – The FBI on Monday executed a search warrant on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
“My beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a statement first sent to CNN.
It wasn’t immediately clear what the FBI was looking for and what spurred the raid.
However, the Department of Justice recently acknowledged it had launched an investigation into Trump’s actions leading up to Jan. 6.
Multiple outlets cited several individuals familiar with the investigation in their reports.
The outlets noted that prosecutors had asked witnesses before a grand jury about conversations with Trump.
“Some of the questions focused on substituting Trump allies for electors in states President Joe Biden won and on a pressure campaign on then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election, the newspaper reported,” the Washington Post reported earlier this month.
The newspaper said the Justice Department obtained aides’ telephone records, including former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The Department of Justice, a Trump spokesperson, and a lawyer for Meadows did not respond to requests for comment.
In an NBC Nightly News interview last week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said “anyone” would be held accountable.
“We will hold accountable anyone who was criminally responsible for attempting to interfere with the transfer, legitimate, lawful transfer of power from one administration to the next,” Garland said.
The former President declared the election as fraudulent “right out of the box on election night before there was any potential of looking at the evidence,” former U.S. Attorney William Barr said in a taped deposition played by Committee members in June.
Matt Morgan, the Trump campaign’s general counsel, provided a videotaped deposition in which he noted that “the law firms were not comfortable making arguments that (lawyer and advisor) Rudy Giuliani was making publicly” about election fraud.
One lawmaker described Giuliani as “apparently inebriated.”
At the same time, Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, testified that the former President waited in the White House in a room with advisers while awaiting election results.
Meanwhile, Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien, said his boss disagreed with those who suggested it was too early to call the election.
“They were going to go in a different direction,” related Kushner, who admitted telling Trump that “it was not the approach I would take if I were you.”
Following Joe Biden’s election win, Trump publicly declared himself the victor, and the Big Lie began.
He told supporters at the White House, including Barr, that a big vote dump had occurred in Detroit.
“I said, ‘Did anyone point out to you – did all the people complaining about it point out to you, you actually did better in Detroit than you did last time?” Barr stated.
The former attorney general declared, “there’s no indication of fraud in Detroit.”