Joe Biden
Joe BidenREUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

US President Joe Biden on Tuesday denounced Republican attacks on the integrity of the FBI, and an upsurge in threats against the agency, in the wake of its raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

"It's sickening to see the new attacks on the FBI... There is no place in this country for endangering the lives of law enforcement. No place. None. Period. I'm opposed to defunding the police, I'm also opposed to defunding the FBI," Biden said in a speech in Pennsylvania, according to the AFP news agency.

His comments come after allies of Trump criticized the FBI following its agents’ search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort for classified documents.

Last week, the Department of Justice released a heavily redacted affidavit that was used to justify the August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.

While the document contains little information about the search itself, it does reveal that an initial collection of boxes from Mar-a-Lago in January yielded 15 boxes containing 184 documents that were classified, secret or top secret.

A New York Times report last Monday indicated that the US government recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mar-a-Lago.

According to the report, the classified documents included material from the CIA, the National Security Agency and the FBI.

Several days after the FBI raid, a judge in Florida unsealed the search warrant for Trump’s home of Mar-a-Lago and related documents.

The warrant says that the FBI is investigating the former President for a potential violation of the Espionage Act.

Trump, who asserted after the FBI raid that agents might be "planting" evidence at Mar-a-Lago, has argued that the records taken by the FBI had been declassified.

"The country is in a very dangerous position. There is tremendous anger, like I've never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one – years of scams and witch hunts, and now this," Trump told Fox News in an interview last week. "If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that.”

The former President confirmed that his representatives had not heard back from the Justice Department on accepting his offer.

"There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country – at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times," he said.