'KGB-style tactics': Congresswoman born in USSR blasts FBI raid

Following the FBI's Monday morning raid on former President Donald Trump's Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago, Indiana GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz, who grew up in the Soviet Union, likened the Bureau's operation to those of the KGB, the USSR's notorious secret police and intelligence force.

“As a U.S. Congresswoman who grew up in the USSR, the FBI raid of President Trump’s home is alarming. It is reminiscent of KGB-style tactics,” Spartz told the Epoch Times. Spartz was born in Nosivka, in the Chernihiv region of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, now in independent Ukraine.

FBI agents from the Washington Field Office raided the former president's home on Monday reportedly in search of classified documents he may have removed from the White House. Trump himself said the FBI's actions signaled the country was declining into the political instability commonly associated with developing nations.

"Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries," he lamented. "Sadly America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe!"

Spartz made an appeal for Americans to look beyond partisanship and recognize the threat that political persecution poses to the political system, saying “[r]egardless of people’s feelings about President Trump, this should not be acceptable in a democratic society."

“If the federal government can raid the home of a former president, all Americans should ask: what can 87,000 new IRS agents do to me?” she asked. The recent $740 billion budget reconciliation bill allocated funding for the tax collection agency to recruit additional agents. The IRS has also come under scrutiny for its large-scale purchases of ammunition.

Spartz was present at a meeting between Trump and senior Republicans that followed the raid, the Times noted. Trump has reportedly made his decision on whether to launch a new presidential campaign, though he has thus far kept that decision close to the vest. His son Eric signaled on Wednesday that his father was "shattering" fundraising records after the raid.

Trump himself suggested the raid was an effort to stop him from running in the 2024 election, attributing the raid to "Radical Left Democrats who desperately don't want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls."