Shortly after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home earlier this month, former President Donald Trump fumed on social media about agents rummaging through his wife’s clothing and personal items.
Shortly after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home earlier this month, former President Donald Trump fumed on social media about agents rummaging through his wife’s clothing and personal items.
“Just learned that agents went through the First Lady’s closets and rummaged through her clothing and personal items. Surprisingly, left area in a relative mess. Wow!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
He was much angrier — exclamation-point angry — than Melania Trump, according to five people who spoke to CNN about Melania Trump’s recent activities under the condition of anonymity to protect personal and professional relationships.
“She cared, but not like he cared,” said a person familiar with the former first lady’s response.
“It annoyed her,” said another person of the search, who noted it was the invasion of her privacy that prompted her to get upset — not the nature of the investigation that sparked the search, or what it meant, or might possibly come to mean, legally, for her husband.
The feds being in her bedroom, her closets and her bathroom skirted a bit too close to her independent orbit. But the former first lady has not been provoked enough to make a public statement about the search, or what it turned up. Instead, her public statements — through her Twitter account — have focused on her most apparent passion since leaving Washington: NFTs.
CNN reached out several times to Trump for comment on this story and did not receive a response.
“She’s private, and she’s protective of her son and her home,” added the second person.
The warrant was explicit about the rooms and areas the agents could search, and it included any space the former president frequents, says a person familiar with the details of warrant’s execution. The Trumps have separate bedrooms in their 3,500 square feet at Mar-a-Lago, three people familiar with the layout tell CNN, but Melania Trump’s bedroom and closets are just down a short hall from the former President’s sleeping quarters and home office.
Though put out and annoyed that strangers went through her curated and expensive collection of clothes and shoes and bags, say those who know her, she was — and remains –characteristically quiet.
“Why would she say anything?” says a person familiar with Trump’s longstanding taciturn communications strategy. “Her thinking is, if she’s quiet, it will just go away,” says this person.
Trump’s few recent public sightings include a visit to a Manhattan hair salon.
The coolness also stems from a fundamental certainty that Donald Trump’s possessions, however obtained, would not be found in her bedroom or closet.
“She would never allow him to keep his stuff in her room, and he would frankly never ask,” says one of the people.
