Rudy Giuliani said that Donald Trump bragged about the size of the crowd outside his Florida property after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home last Monday. 

Giuliani, a former New York mayor and longtime Trump ally, told Newsmax that Trump’s first reaction was that the raid is “going to help me.”

“You see the number of people in front of Mar-a-Lago already? This is gonna turn around, American people have common sense, they’ve gone too far now,” Giuliani recalled Trump telling him.

Trump is known to be obsessed with crowd size. During the early days of his presidency, his administration made false claims about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. In his final days in office, Trump was concerned about the size of the crowd at his speech on January 6, which led him to demand security to allow armed spectators through the metal detectors, according to testimony by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

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During the January 6 House Committee hearing last month, Hutchinson said that Trump was “concerned” about the TV cameras’ shot of the area not being filled with people.

On August 8, the FBI executed a search warrant on Trump’s home in search of classified documents which the justice department believed the former president took with him after leaving office.

In the following days, Trump and the Department of Justice agreed to unseal documents relating to the search. The documents listed three statutes that were used to justify the seizure of boxes and documents from the property.

Some of the materials were marked “top secret/SCI” – one of the highest levels of classification, according to documents.

Investigators are trying to find if Trump broke three federal laws relating to the handling of classified information, including the Espionage Act.

Also Read | Trump says he supports DoJ’s call to release Mar-a-Lago search warrant

The laws cited in the warrant cover “destroying or concealing documents to obstruct government investigations” along with the unlawful removal of government records, according to a copy of the search warrant.

The Espionage Act relates to the “retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material.”