Without offering any evidence, Mr. Cruz argued that the Aug. 8 raid on Donald Trump’s Florida residence was part of a secret Justice Department plan to gather evidence about the Jan. 6 riot. “What’s really painful now looking at the warrant and what they were looking for, this was a fishing expedition,” Mr. Cruz said on the Verdict with Ted Cruz podcast. “I don’t think it had anything to do with classified documents, it was about the 6th of January. The point was that the FBI and the DOJ wanted to send a team to say let’s grab every piece of paper we can find and maybe we’ll get something incriminating.” He went on to compare the raid to “hunting Al Capone” for tax evasion. “It’s nothing new for law enforcement to try to find a hook.” Trump and his allies in the Republican Party have made numerous unsubstantiated claims about the raid in recent days. Ted says he believes the FBI and DOJ lied under oath to get the search warrant: “This was a fishing spree… I think it had nothing to do with classified documents. The subject was J6.” pic.twitter.com/KvUise7dRL — Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 20, 2022 The former president initially claimed the investigation was politically motivated, that evidence may have been planted and his passports “stolen”. After the Justice Department’s search warrant was released and showed that investigators believed the Espionage Act had been violated, he shifted to saying he had declassified all the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago. After legal experts dismissed that theory, Mr. Trump claimed attorney-client privilege.
