US Politics
Trump rants about First Lady Melania’s ‘panties’ drawer while blasting Mar-a-Lago raid during rambling economy speech
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President Donald Trump veered off topic during his Friday night speech on the economy to slam the 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, which he said included agents raiding First Lady Melania Trump’s “panties” drawer.
As part of the government’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 in search of sensitive records. Jack Smith, former special prosecutor charged with leading the Trump probe, told lawmakers this week in a closed-door interview that his team had gathered “powerful evidence” that the president had broken the law by holding onto the classified material.
Trump also returned to the years-old raid Friday after making a stop in North Carolina for a rally-style speech, ostensibly about the economy, on his way to Mar-a-Lago for two weeks Christmas vacation. During his remarks, Trump blasted the raid as “illegal and disgusting,” alleging agents searched through his wife’s “panties” drawer.
“I was the hunted…I had these animals trying to attack me at Mar-a-Lago,” the president said Friday. “They went into my wife’s closet and I’ll say this, number one, it’s very bad, but it sounds a little strange. They looked at her drawers.
He added that the first lady is a “very meticulous person. Everything is perfect. Her undergarments…sometimes referred to as panties, are folded, perfect. They’re so perfect, I say: ‘That’s beautiful.’”
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“I think she steams them,” he added, moving his hands as if he were steaming clothes, which prompted chuckles from the audience.
“We came home. I wasn’t there when the raid took place,” he said. “She opened the drawers and it was not that way. They were a mess.”
“It was all over the place. And she said, ‘Oh, what happened? That’s so terrible.’…They went into my young boy’s room. These thugs are disgusting, and we cannot let them get away with this stuff.”
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“We have all the evidence, and we have to do something about it,” Trump concluded, his voice rising. The crowd clapped and cheered in response.
The government, under former President Joe Biden, launched two federal probes into Trump: his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump has demanded the Justice Department pay him $230 million in compensation over the federal investigations after he left office. He submitted a complaint for each probe, one in 2023 and the other in 2024, through “an administrative claim process,” the New York Times reported in October.
After Trump won the 2024 election, Smith dropped the cases against the incoming president. Smith told members of Congress this week that his investigative team had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump had criminally conspired to overturn the 2020 election results and had collected “powerful evidence” that he had violated the law related to the handling of classified documents.
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Emails between FBI and DOJ officials in the months leading up to the August 2022 raid, made public this week by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, suggest that the bureau didn’t believe it had probable cause to execute the search warrant on Trump’s Palm Beach property, while the Justice Department insisted it did.
Trump also spoke about his compensation claims during his Friday night economic speech, upped the amount from $230 million to $1 billion. He claimed he now has to “settle” the complaint himself because it’s his Justice Department: “I brought a lawsuit and I’m winning the lawsuit. There’s only one problem: I’m the one that has to settle it.”
He then suggested: “So, maybe I’ll give myself $1 billion and give it all to charity.”
A minute later, the president appeared to change his mind. “Actually, maybe I shouldn’t give it to charity. Maybe I should keep the money,” he said.
