President Donald Trump made an off-color joke about the FBI going through his wife’s “drawers” as he sought to distance himself from the raid against his former national security adviser John Bolton.
Speaking in the Oval Office hours after agents descended on Bolton’s Maryland home on Friday morning, Trump once again insisted he had nothing to do with the investigation against his longstanding nemesis.
But the President also brought up the raid that the FBI conducted on his Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022, when the then Republican candidate was the subject of a Biden Justice Department probe into the alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Trump was livid about the agency executing the search warrant at the time, claiming that FBI officers had “rummaged” through First Lady Melania Trump’s clothing and personal items and then left the area in a mess.
But as he recounted the episode on Friday, the president made a somewhat off-color quip, telling reporters: “They went through everything they could, including my young son’s room and my wife’s area. They went through her drawers, as the expression goes.
“She’s very neat, you know, she’s meticulous,” Trump added. “And when she came back, she looked, and she said: ‘whoa, this wasn’t the way that she had it’. So I know the feeling. It’s not a good feeling.”
The Mar-a-Lago raid eventually led to Trump being indicted on 37 federal charges, most of which related to the “willful retention” of classified material in violation of the Espionage Act.
The documents – which included information relating to nuclear programs and high-level intelligence – were taken after Trump left the White House in 2021 and were stored in boxes all over his Florida estate.
But the charges, for which he pleaded not guilty, were eventually dropped by Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Canon in the lead up to the 2024 election.
Now it’s Bolton, who worked for Trump during his first administration but has been an outspoken critic since, that faces scrutiny over his own handling of classified information.
Trump’s FBI, led by MAGA acolyte Kash Patel, descended on Bolton’s home at dawn as part of an investigation into whether he illegally shared or possessed classified information.
A source told the Daily Beast that some of that information related to his 2020 book, The Room Where It Happened, which Trump sought to quash at the time.
However, the book was published, presenting one of the most detailed and damaging accounts of Trump’s first term.
The pair have had bad blood ever since, with Trump once declaring that Bolton ought to be jailed because he “took classified information, and he published it during a presidency.”
However, the president on Friday insisted he didn’t know about the raid in advance and had “purposely” stayed out of it.
But he added: “I’m not a fan of John Bolton. I thought he was a sleaze-bag, actually, and he’s suffers major Trump Derangement Syndrome, but so do a lot of people.”
The post Trump Makes Off-Color Joke About His Wife’s ‘Drawers’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
