There is no mechanism in American law or history for re-run presidential elections, nor for declaring the loser of an election the winner two years after the event. But Mr Trump appeared to ignore that fact when he took to his own Truth Social platform to make such an impossible claim on Monday morning. “So it now turns out, definitively, that the FBI buried the HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP story BEFORE THE ELECTION knowing that if they hadn’t, ‘Trump would have easily won the 2020 Presidential Election,’” he wrote, referring to the oft-cited his complaint about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s failure to disclose an ongoing investigation into the younger Mr. Biden in the run-up to the last presidential election. In December 2020, Hunter Biden—a Yale-educated lawyer and former lobbyist—revealed that the FBI was investigating whether he had properly paid taxes on income from several foreign business ventures. The FBI, which generally does not acknowledge the existence of investigations due to long-standing Justice Department policies, followed these policies despite Trump’s frequent claims on the campaign trail that both Hunter Biden and his father deserved to be arrested and prosecuted for unspecified crimes . Mr Trump called his baseless allegations against the FBI “MASSIVE FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE on a scale never before seen in our country” and suggested that a “solution” would be to “declare the rightful winner”, namely himself. He added that a different “minimum solution” would be to “declare the 2020 election irretrievably compromised and have a new election, immediately!” The former president comes as he faces heightened legal risk from an FBI investigation into whether he violated US laws against the unauthorized possession of national defense information and obstruction of justice by keeping boxes of highly classified documents at his home in Palm Beach, Florida after his term as president was over. An amended version of the affidavit used to secure a warrant for the Aug. 8 search of Mr. Trump’s property revealed that the 15 boxes of documents the former president turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration in January contained “184 unique documents that carry classification markings, including 67 documents classified as confidential, 92 documents classified as secret, and 25 documents classified as top secret.” Even more documents were found at Mr Trump’s home during the August search. On Monday, federal prosecutors filed court documents revealing that the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence “facilitate classified review of materials recovered pursuant to the investigation” at the request of Congress. US Attorney Juan Gonzalez said the ODNI was “leading the intelligence community’s assessment of the potential risk to national security” if the highly classified materials found at Mar-a-Lago were disclosed as a result of Mr Trump’s conduct.
