WASHINGTON, D.C.: Top Republican leaders flung their support behind former United States president Donald Trump on Tuesday (Wednesday in Manila) after an extraordinary Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raid on his palatial residence in Florida sparked a political firestorm in an already bitterly divided country.

The FBI’s move marked a stunning escalation of legal probes into the 45th president and comes as he is weighing another White House run.

Several former advisers to the 76-year-old Trump urged him to immediately confirm that he would be a presidential candidate in 2024.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” Trump said of the FBI operation at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida’s West Palm Beach.

He denounced the raid as a “weaponization of the Justice System” by “Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.”

At the White House, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said US President Joe Biden did not have any advance notice about the raid and respected the independence of the Justice Department.

Asked about the potential for civil unrest in reaction to Trump’s legal problems, Jean-Pierre said “there’s no place for political violence in this country.”

The FBI, led by Trump appointee Christopher Wray, declined to provide a reason for the raid.

But US media outlets said agents were conducting a courtauthorized search related to the potential mishandling of classified documents that had been sent to Mar-a-Lago after Trump left the White House in January 2021.

Trump has also faced intense legal scrutiny for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and over the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.

Since leaving office, Trump has remained the country’s most divisive figure, continuing to sow falsehoods that he actually won the 2020 vote.

A day after the raid, Trump ally Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania said FBI agents had confiscated his cellular phone, but did not specify why it was taken.

“This morning, while traveling with my family, three FBI agents visited me and seized my cell phone,” Perry told FOX News, condemning “these kinds of banana republic tactics.”

Allies rally round

Leading Republicans rallied around the former leader, who was not at Mar-a-Lago when the raid took place.

Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence, a potential 2024 rival, expressed “deep concern” and said the raid smacked of “partisanship” by the Justice Department.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, who is seeking to become speaker of the House of Representatives if Republicans win November’s midterm elections, accused the department of “weaponized politicization.”

Another Trump ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said “launching an investigation of a former president this close to an election is beyond problematic.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking House Republican, called it a “dark day in American history.”

“If the FBI can raid a US President, imagine what they can do to you,” Stefanik tweeted, to which Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu replied: “Why can’t the FBI investigate a US President? We’re not Russia, where the law doesn’t apply to the head of state and his cronies.”

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, told NBC that “no person is above the law.”

In his statement, Trump did not give any indication on why the FBI raided his home but said: “They even broke into my safe!”

Andrew McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, told CNN that agents might have been looking for “something specific” related to the probe into the handling of classified information.

The National Archives said in February it had recovered 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago and asked the Justice Department to look into Trump’s handling of classified material.

The recovery of the boxes raised questions about Trump’s adherence to presidential records laws enacted after the 1970s Watergate scandal that require Oval Office occupants to preserve records.