- Eric Trump says he was the one who got the call in the morning about the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
- He said the FBI went through an office, a closet, and a safe at Mar-a-Lago.
- Trump said there is "no family in American history that has taken more arrows in the back" than his.
Eric Trump, former President Donald Trump's son, said on Monday night he was the one who informed his father that Mar-a-Lago was being searched by the FBI.
Trump — speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity — said he was "the guy that got the call this morning."
"I called my father and let him know that it happened," Trump said. "So I was involved in this all day."
Trump was commenting on a high-profile FBI search of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Monday. The former president said the FBI "broke into" his safe when executing the search warrant and denounced the raid as "politically motivated" — despite having himself appointed the FBI's current director, Christopher Wray.
After the search, Eric Trump complained to Hannity that he thought there is "no family in American history that has taken more arrows in the back than the Trump family."
"Every day, we get another subpoena," Trump said. "That's what this is about today, to have 30 FBI agents — actually, more than that —descend on Mar-a-Lago give absolutely, you know, no notice. Go through the gate, start ransacking an office, ransacking a closet. You know, they broke into a safe. He didn't even have anything in the safe. I mean, give me a break."
Trump then commented on what he thought the FBI was looking for, saying that his father kept "press clippings" and other paraphernalia.
"You'd have, you know, newspaper articles, pictures, notes from us. When my mom passed away a couple of weeks ago, you know, he still had all the notes," Trump said. "You know, over the years they've been saved all the notes that she had ever written him. Hey, man, it's a beautiful thing. My father saves clippings and things like that."
Trump then said that his father had taken "boxes" with him when he hurriedly moved out of the White House.
"If you want to search for anything, if you think anything — like, come right ahead," Trump said. "It was an open-door policy."
Contrary to Trump's account of his family's "open-door policy," the Trumps have not had a long history of handing over documents and cooperating with investigators.
In April, Donald Trump was found in contempt of court in New York and was ordered to pay the New York attorney general a $10,000-a-day fine for not complying with a subpoena to hand over personal business documents. In June, the contempt-of-court order was lifted after more information was provided by Trump's lawyers.
It is unclear what the FBI search was specifically related to, though three sources told CNN it was related to documents that may have been improperly taken to Mar-a-Lago.
The National Archives asked the DOJ in February to investigate whether or not Trump broke the law by taking government records from the White House to his Florida residence.