The Mar-a-Lago raid was a "very political fishing expedition" conceived to damage former President Donald Trump by President Joe Biden's White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Democrats, Paul Manafort, the campaign manager for Trump's 2016 campaign, said on Newsmax Monday.
They want to deflect from the record of the Democrats' mismanagement, he added.
"I mean, that's the whole goal of this," Manafort, the author of "Political Prisoner: Persecuted, Prosecuted, but Not Silenced," told Newsmax's "John Bachman Now." "They're making Trump the campaign issue for the midterms, but it's not going to work."
For one, Manafort said, the push against Trump will motivate GOP voters to turn out, but also, it will "expose once again that the Democrats have weaponized the judicial system. I mean, there's no basis for this."
Further, the FBI's "no-knock raid" on Trump's home is an issue, said Manafort.
"I'm not saying they don't have a right to figure out if there are documents there, but there's a process for that," said Manafort. "They were far from finished with the process. [Attorney General] Merrick Garland getting out there and saying, We took the least intrusive approach to get these documents, was baloney.
"I mean, they took the most intrusive, most politically charged action ever in the history of the country, going after a political opponent who could be a political opponent in the future election as well."
Even if classified documents are found among the seized materials, Trump has "plenty of defenses as to why there were there at all," Manafort added.
It also shows the "hypocrisy" of the system, considering former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had many classified documents on her email server, he added.
"But Trump with documents in his basement, secured under lock and key in boxes, Oh, it's a greater national threat," said Manafort. "It's just the way it is very apparent on his face what the intent was to do. It's totally political."
Manafort compared it to his own situation, as he was convicted of multiple crimes stemming from the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation and sent to prison before Trump pardoned him.
"This is not talking about trying to get secure documents to go to the government," he said. "They could have done that many different ways. This is meant to try and go after Donald Trump criminally and that's what the Democrats do. They went after me for every violation, which I talked about in my book, that had never been criminalized before they went after [me]."
But the Democrats and the Garland Justice Department will indict Trump if they don't care about unifying the country, as Biden has said he does.
"It's a specious charge," he said. "It's really no different than Russian collusion, impeachment No. 1 or No. 2 for a phone call, and now records that are in a basement in a box. You know they want to convict him. It's absurd."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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