On the day before the F.B.I. obtained a search warrant almost two years ago to look for classified materials at former President Donald J. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, one of the agents on the case sent a reassuring email to his bosses.
“The F.B.I. intends for the execution of the warrant to be handled in a professional, low key manner,” he wrote, “and to be mindful of the optics of the search.”
And that’s more or less what happened when 30 agents and two federal prosecutors entered the grounds of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach estate, at 8:59 a.m. on Aug. 8, 2022. Over the next 10 hours, according to court papers, there was little drama as they hauled away a trove of boxes containing highly sensitive state secrets in three vans and a rented Ryder box truck.
Two years later, Mr. Trump has tried to flip the facts about that search entirely on their head, in particular by twisting the meaning of boilerplate instructions to the agents about limits on their use of lethal force.
Even though the court-authorized warrant was executed while he was more than 1,000 miles away in the New York area, the former president in recent weeks has repeatedly promoted the blatantly false narrative that the agents had shown up that day prepared to kill him, when the instructions in fact laid out strict conditions intended to minimize any use of deadly force.
“It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Trump wrote in a fund-raising email last month.