After the FBI completed a lawful search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, 2022, Conservative politicians responded with one of three strategies: silence, circumspection, and attack.
Many responses echoed Trump’s own framing of the search. In his Aug. 8 message, he claimed his residence was “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.” In the statement, replete with war metaphors, Trump alleged that executing a legal warrant was “the weaponization of the Justice System” and an “assault” that “could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries.”
Trump’s framing of the event was quickly echoed by most Republican politicians commenting immediately on Twitter, despite the fact that they, like Democrats and the public, lacked relevant knowledge of the facts of the case that prompted the search and seizure of classified documents.
— source theconversation.com | Karrin Vasby Anderson | Aug 16, 2022