Former President Donald Trump suggested the FBI may have been looking for Hillary Clinton’s lost emails when it raided his Mar-a-Lago resort last month in a search for classified documents he kept after leaving the White House.
Trump said he declassified the trove of documents that federal agents found at his Palm Beach, Fla., oceanside resort before proposing an alternative reason why the FBI descended on his property.
“There’s also a lot of speculation because of what they did, the severity of the FBI coming and raiding Mar-a-Lago. Were they looking for the Hillary Clinton emails that were deleted but they are around someplace? They may have thought that it was in there!” Trump said in an interview Wednesday with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
During the 2016 presidential election, Trump hammered Clinton, then the Democratic nominee, on her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state in the Obama administration, leading to chants of “Lock her up” at his political rallies.
The Justice Department investigated Clinton’s use of the private email server, including former FBI Director James Comey announcing the reopening of the probe days before Election Day 2016.
While the investigation did find some classified emails on Clinton’s server, the Justice Department decided not to charge Clinton.
The FBI removed thousands of documents from Mar-a-Lago during its search on Aug. 8, including more than a hundred marked classified.
Earlier this month, Clinton rejected any comparisons to the materials Trump kept at Mar-a-Lago and the emails on her private server.
“I can’t believe we’re still talking about this, but my emails … As Trump’s problems continue to mount, the right is trying to make this about me again. There’s even a ’Clinton Standard.’The fact is that I had zero emails that were classified,” she posted on her Twitter account.