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Washington, September 4
Donald Trump has lashed out at his successor Joe Biden by branding him an “enemy of the state” at his first rally since the FBI searched the former US president’s Florida estate for sensitive classified files.
Trump hit back at President Biden’s assertion last week in Philadelphia that the former leader and his die-hard Republican supporters are undermining American democracy.
Biden in his address outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday night said: “This is a nation that rejects violence as a political tool. We are still, at our core, a democracy. Yet history tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and the willingness to engage in political violence is fatal in a democracy.” Trump, 76, slammed Biden’s remarks as the “most vicious, hateful and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president”.
“He’s an enemy of the state. You want to know the truth. The enemy of the state is him,” Trump said on Saturday.
“There can be no more vivid example of the very real threats from American freedom than just a few weeks ago, you saw, when we witnessed one of the most shocking abuses of power by any administration in American history,” Trump said, referring to the August 8 FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago home.
He said that the search was a “travesty of justice”.
He warned it would produce “a backlash the likes of which nobody has ever seen”.
“It was not just my home that was raided last month. It was the hopes and dreams of every citizen who I’ve been fighting for,” Trump said in his nearly two-hour speech.
The former president was speaking in Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania in support of Mehmet Oz, the Republican candidate for US Senate, and Doug Mastriano, the candidate for governor.
His comments come as speculation intensified about Trump announcing his intentions to run for president in 2024, ahead of the 2022 midterm elections in November.
The former president said: “The FBI and the justice department have become vicious monsters, controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media, who tell them what to do.” “They’re trying to silence me and more importantly they’re trying to silence you. But we will not be silenced, right?” Investigators recovered thousands of documents, including more than 100 with classified and top-secret markings that Trump took from the White House.
Trump, who is being investigated over his handling of classified records, denies wrongdoing.
A Trump-appointed judge is considering Trump’s request for the appointment of a court official to review the documents for any covered by executive privilege.
Last week, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri said Trump should have turned the documents over.
William P Barr, who served as attorney general under Trump, has defended the FBI search.
Court records show that the FBI has collected 18 documents marked as top secret, 54 marked as secret, 31 marked as confidential and 11,179 government documents or photographs without classification markings.
According to the court filings, the sensitive, government-owned documents were in containers mixed among news clippings, articles of clothing and gifts.
Trump, a Republican, won the US state of Pennsylvania in 2016, one success in a string of usually Democratic states which fuelled his victory over Hillary Clinton. But Biden won it in 2020. Ahead of the 2022 midterm election in November, Biden is spending considerable time in Pennsylvania, underscoring the political significance this year of what may be the nation’s ultimate battleground state.
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