With the FBI’s recent raid on one of the homes of former President Donald Trump, the federal justice system in America has sunk below the level of third-world countries, according to Kash Patel, a former national security official in the Trump administration.
The FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida on Aug. 8 looking for White House documents Trump may have taken with him when leaving office, a lawyer for Trump told The Epoch Times. Trump said he’s been cooperating with law enforcement for months and there was no need for a raid.
The unprecedented raid has been denounced by most Republicans and even some Democrats on the basis of it appearing politically motivated as well as overly aggressive for a matter usually resolved in a low-key fashion, if addressed at all. Some pointed out that the Obama administration failed to hand over White House documents to the National Archives on a dramatically larger scale without any repercussions.
“I’ve been in countries all over the world, prosecuted terrorists in Africa,“ Patel commented during a recent interview with Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek. ”At this point, they have a far superior system of justice than we do in America.”
The terrorist trials in east Africa he was involved in, he said, were handled more impartially than how the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) operates today.
“They brought national security prosecutions and convicted everybody while maintaining due process. We don’t have due process anymore here,” he said.
America, he said, now suffers under a two-tier justice system that treats Trump and his supporters more harshly and Democrats more leniently.
He gave multiple examples, from the FBI’s illegal spying on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2017 to the recent allegations by FBI whistleblowers that the bureau improperly shuttered a stream of evidence about the foreign dealings of Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden.
Trump lawyer Christina Bobb told The Epoch Times that the FBI agents searching his home were looking for presidential records, indicating that the warrant was based on laws governing retention of presidential records and possibly handling of classified information.
Such a justification “doesn’t hold water,” Patel said.
President is the “final arbiter of classification authority” and has “a unilateral authority to classify and declassify documents by just saying so,” Patel noted.
Moreover, former presidents retain security clearances and regularly handle classified information.
“A lot of these guys continuously, as former presidents, and I believe rightfully so, access classified information, because they used to be the commander in chief, and they do consulting work and people talk to them and seek advice,” he said.
As for Trump’s holding on to materials that should be handed over to the National Archives, Trump was in continuous communication with law enforcement on that matter, Bobb said, and even gave the FBI a tour of the storage room where he kept White House materials two months ago.
“If it was related to that, why didn’t they just do what we normally do in those situations and call and say, ‘Hey, we think you have x, we want to review it. Can you return it?’” Patel said.
“Search warrant? You could have just issued a subpoena. Do you need 30 armed, swatted-up FBI agents to go in there, maybe with counterintelligence, for nine hours?”
