GOP Lawmaker Reveals Trump’s Mindset 1 Day After FBI Raid

A photo released by Rep. Jim Banks's office shows former President Donald Trump and members of the committee at Trump's New Jersey residence on Aug. 9, 2022. Office of Rep. Jim Banks/Twitter

A top House Republican lawmaker said he visited former President Donald Trump at his New Jersey home on Aug. 9, revealing Trump’s mindset following the unprecedented FBI raid on Aug. 8.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, said in an interview that Trump is “very upbeat” and has “made up his mind” about 2024. In the visit with the former commander in chief, Banks was accompanied by about a dozen other members of his caucus.

“He didn’t seem defeated in the least bit—he was very fired up, very upbeat,” Banks told Fox News of Trump’s mindset, coming one day after the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida.

“He said we are going to like his decision and it is only a matter of time before he will make that decision known,” Banks told the outlet, adding that he and other lawmakers called on Trump to make a decision on whether to run “sooner rather than later.”

The former president “only helps us win back more seats in November,” Banks said. “The Republican Party is bigger and stronger than ever before because of Donald Trump’s leadership.”

On the evening of Aug. 8, Trump said on Truth Social that Mar-a-Lago was raided by FBI agents. Neither the Department of Justice nor the FBI has publicly commented on the raid. The two agencies didn’t respond by press time to repeated requests by The Epoch Times for comment.

A spokesperson for Trump said that the agents were searching the premises for documents.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) speaks about Iran to the media with members of the Republican Study Committee in Washington on April 21, 2021. Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

The agents spent about 10 hours there and left with “a handful of boxes of documents,” Trump attorney Christina Bobb told The Epoch Times. “I didn’t actually get to oversee the search; they wouldn’t let anybody see what they were doing.”

FBI agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records,” Bobb said. “I don’t think there was anything of substance.”

Trump Bid?

And while Trump hasn’t definitively confirmed whether he will run for president in 2024, his recent speeches strongly suggest that he will.

On Aug. 6, Trump spoke to a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, noting that he won millions more votes in 2020 than in 2016.

An unofficial straw poll conducted during CPAC revealed that Trump would overwhelmingly win the 2024 GOP nomination for president, with 69 percent saying they preferred him over other candidates. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, got second place with 24 percent of the vote.

GOP candidates need to create a “national referendum” on Democrats’ policies around crime, inflation, and immigration, Trump said.

“People are walking outside and getting shot in the head,” Trump said. “Because of the radical left’s merciless crusade to dismantle law enforcement in America, our country is now a cesspool of crime that it has never been before.”

Eighteen months after leaving office, Trump remains the Republican Party’s most influential voice. Observers suggested this FBI search could bolster his standing with Republican voters.

“The Biden administration is only adding rocket fuel to Trump’s campaign prospects and energizing his supporters who want him to run again,” Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist in Washington, told Reuters. “There should be more transparency around the decision to have this FBI raid because it looks overly political and allows Trump to say he’s being unfairly attacked.”