Trump warns ‘terrible things are going to happen’ in US after ‘sneak attack’ FBI raid

Former President Donald Trump warned Monday that “the temperature has to be brought down in the country” or “terrible things are going to happen” before accusing the FBI of a “sneak attack” raid on his Florida estate last week.

“The country is in a very dangerous position,” Trump told Fox News Digital in his first interview since the Aug. 8 search. “There is tremendous anger, like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one — years of scams and witch hunts, and now this.”

“If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that,” the 45th president continued.

Federal agents seized more than two dozen boxes of items, including 11 sets of classified documents, from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.

According to an inventory that was unsealed by a federal judge Friday, four sets of documents were marked “Top Secret,” the highest level of classification the government can give information; three were marked “Secret,” the second-highest level, while the remaining three were marked “Confidential,” the lowest classification level.

Another set was marked “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” which is the abbreviation for “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,” a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets.

News of the raid caused outrage among the former president’s supporters, with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warning this weekend of a spike in threats to law enforcement.

“The people of this country are not going to stand for another scam,” said Trump, who claimed that he and his legal team had contacted the Justice Department and offered to assist in their investigation into whether the former president violated three federal laws dealing with government information.

The former President told Fox News Digital that his team “has not heard yet” from the DOJ.

“I think they would want the same thing—I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “It is a very dangerous time for our country.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the former president contended: “There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country—at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times.”

Trump then lamented “years of fake witch hunts and phony Russia, Russia, Russia schemes and scams.”

“And then they break into a president’s house— a sneak attack where it was totally—no one ever thought a thing like this would happen,” he added.

The FBI operation occurred as Trump is publicly mulling a third consecutive run for the White House in 2024.

The 45th president reacted angrily to the raid, even suggesting that agents may have planted evidence during their search. On Monday, he claimed that the searchers told his team to turn off security cameras and remain outdoors while the raid took place.

“They could take anything they want, and put anything they want in,” Trump told Fox News Digital Monday. “My people were asked to stand outside.”

On Sunday, the former president called on the Department of Justice to return the seized documents, citing a Fox News report that at least five of the 27 boxes removed from Mar-a-Lago contained information covered by attorney-client or executive privilege​.

“Oh great! It has just been learned that the FBI, in its now famous raid of Mar-a-Lago, took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken,” Trump said on his Truth Social site.

“By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!,” he wrote.

The three statutes at issue ban the gathering, transmission or loss of defense information (a law commonly known as the Espionage Act); the concealment, removal or mutilation of documents; or the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal probes.

Trump’s team is arguing that the documents were in fact declassified, citing a “standing order” the former president had while in office that deemed sensitive documents “declassified the moment he removed them” from the White House.

Despite the claim, the New York Times reported this weekend that a member of Trump’s legal team​ signed a written statement during a visit by Justice Department officials in early June — two months before the raid — contending that all classified material once held at Mar-a-Lago had been returned to the government.