During a recent appearance on the right-wing media outlet known as Newsmax, Donald Trump Jr. went on an angry tirade when asked about law enforcement personnel reportedly finding concerning moments on surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago.
He dismissed the whole thing, of course, and while doing so, he was talking in a frenzied-sounding voice the entire time. “This is Russia, Russia, Russia, part 976,” Trump Jr. dismissively complained, seeming both angry and harried. “We’ve heard this before. Whenever they lose control of the narrative, right?… When they lose control of the narrative because literally anyone in America with a brain understands just how sick of an overreach that is, especially when Trump was cooperating with them all along, they leak a little bit of a tidbit, right?… I know that every person who’s committed an atrocity in America for the last few years has been ‘on their radar.’ Doesn’t seem like they’ve actually stopped any of that. But if your grandmother was within 1,000 miles of January 6, of D.C., they’ve been interviewing her. The FBI has done nothing to deserve any benefit of the doubt at this point.” He mentioned more too, like Peter Strzok — who hasn’t worked at the FBI in years. Check out the remarks below:
Donald Trump Jr is asked on Newsmax to respond to a report about officials seeing something alarming on a Mar-a-Lago security camera ahead of the search. He goes on an unhinged rant about the FBI. pic.twitter.com/WnD1mRBX84
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 18, 2022
Trump Jr.’s description of the FBI scrutinizing people who happened to be near the Capitol last year is obviously deceptive. Federal agents aren’t putting simply random people under pressure amid the riot probe. They’re focusing (largely although not entirely) on those who were there and participated, with many cases targeting individuals who entered the Capitol building or assaulted police. Other charges concern criminal conspiracies underlying some of the violence or additional violence that was planned for by certain right-wing extremists but never carried out.
As for the broader context, Don Jr. was angry over the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, which followed Justice Department personnel obtaining surveillance footage from the Trump property, where the former president has largely resided since leaving the presidency last year. A probe into the handling of classified documents from the Trump administration drove the department obtaining those security tapes and FBI agents eventually descending on the Trump property. During the raid, despite a previous signed statement from a Trump lawyer that all the documents marked as classified from a particular storage area were returned to federal authorities, agents uncovered nearly a dozen sets of classified materials, suggesting the signed statement was a lie. Some of the most sensitive government information was among what federal agents recovered.
