Rep. Jerry Carl, R-Ala., told Newsmax Saturday that President Joe Biden's Department of Justice is treating former President Donald Trump and his family "like common criminals" and should apologize for the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida Aug. 8.
"There's got to be some accountability there," Carl said during "Saturday Report." "Just to go in and treat him and his family like common criminals is where the real issue here is for me. I mean, I think the president, I think his wife, I think this country, deserves an apology."
Carl said that he has read the mostly redacted affidavit supporting the federal search warrant executed by some 30 armed agents seeking potentially classified documents that Trump took from the White House when he left office in January 2021.
"There's nothing there," Carl said. "They redacted most of stuff that we probably want to see, and I said before they were released that it would create more questions than it answered. From a from a personal standpoint, you know, we've got to hold our next president at a very high standard when we talk on him.
"For the FBI to go in and just raid a place like this and go through his wife's personal stuff. I mean, that's about as offensive as you can get."
Carl said that especially raiding the personal items, including clothes, of the former first lady was "borderline perversion."
"I don't think there's anything there," he said. "I think they're used it for fishing expedition. It gave them a good excuse to go in and go through all of his and her personal stuff, and I just don't see anything there."
He said the whole basis for the search and raid sounds more like a civil "document dispute" between Trump and the National Archives rather than a criminal matter that required a search warrant and agents rummaging around in the former president's home.
Carl said the FBI is important and that he uses it locally in Alabama, but the leadership in Washington has corrupted the agency almost to a point of no return.
"The management of the FBI in Washington has just become so corrupt and so political that it can't exist at the way we're going," he said. "It just truly cannot exist."
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