The redacted affidavit that FBI agents used to obtain a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida home has revealed more details about what the Justice Department knew about the records government officials at Mr. Trump’s home before the search.
According to the 38-page document, which was made public by order of US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Friday, FBI agents who examined the contents of boxes recovered from Mr Trump in January 2021 found “184 unique documents with classification marks, including 67. documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET”.
The Justice Department said it was concerned that documents held at Mar-a-Lago could compromise “clandestine human sources” in intelligence gathering.
The unidentified FBI agent who signed the affidavit also said that among the boxes were documents in Mr. Trump’s handwriting.
The agent wrote that the Justice Department’s lawyer sent a letter on June 8 to Mr. Trump’s lawyer to inform them that Mar-a-Lago “does not include an authorized secure location for the storage of of classified information” and asked them to secure the room where the boxes of documents were stored.
The next day, Mr. Trump’s lawyer responded to acknowledge receipt of the letter.
In a memorandum in support of keeping the document’s extensive redactions intact, the Justice Department said it was necessary to shield details of the affidavit from public view to protect “several civilian witnesses whose information was included throughout the affidavit”.
The government disclosed that it had obtained information from a “wide range of civilian witnesses” whose identities were to be protected because they could be subject to retaliation, intimidation or harassment by Trump supporters, including threats against their lives or your safety.
“FBI agents who have been publicly identified in connection with this investigation have received repeated threats of violence from members of the public. Exposing the identities of witnesses would likely erode their confidence in the government’s investigation, and would almost certainly prevent other potential witnesses from coming forward in this and other investigations,” prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors added that the government has “well-founded concerns that steps could be taken to frustrate or otherwise interfere with this investigation” if too much information about its investigative strategy became known.
Mr Trump reacted to the publication of the affidavit with a furious post on his Truth Social platform: “Heavily worded affidavit!!! No mention of ‘Nuclear’, total PR subterfuge by from the FBI and DOJ, or our close working relationship regarding the billing of documents: WE GAVE THEM A LOT. Judge Bruce Reinhart should NEVER have been allowed into my home. Two months ago he he recused himself from one of my cases because of his animosity and hatred of your favorite president, me. What changed? Why hasn’t he recused himself in this case? Obama must be very proud of him right now!”
Judge Reinhart ordered the Justice Department to provide the redacted affidavit after a coalition of news organizations and a conservative group argued that intense public interest in the search of a former president’s home justified the release, although prosecutors successfully persuaded him to allow them to turn black. sections of the document that could reveal “the identities of witnesses, law enforcement officers and unindicted parties” or “the strategy, direction, scope, sources and methods” related to the ongoing investigation into how they ended the highly classified documents in Trump’s publication. possession after his time in office.
He also ordered the department to add redactions to protect grand jury information that must be protected under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
Notably, Mr Trump did not join the request and took no position on whether the affidavit should be released in full or in part, although the former president and his lawyers have asked that it be made public the identities of the witness. The former president’s camp previously leaked an unredacted copy of the search warrant and receipt his lawyers received after the FBI search that named several FBI agents involved, made which led several Trump allies to post alleged agents’ personal details on social media.
In a Monday order directing the department to submit the proposed redactions, the magistrate judge said concerns about potential witness intimidation “are not hypothetical in this case,” citing the barrage of threats that officers and FBI officials have received since Mr. Trump announced that his property had been searched.
“Given the public notoriety and controversy surrounding this search, it is likely that even witnesses not expressly named in the affidavit will be quickly and widely identified through social media and other communication channels, which could lead to them being harassed and intimidated.” He wrote
The search of Mr Trump’s property was the latest chapter in what has emerged as a long-running dispute over the former president’s retention of documents from his former administration.
FBI agents under the supervision of prosecutors in the Department of Justice’s counterintelligence and export control section swore the affidavit when they sought warrants to search the former president’s home and office on the 5th of August.
At a news conference several days after the search, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he “personally” signed off on the decision to seek a warrant, which came after a breakdown in talks between his lawyers , the department and officials with the National Archives and Records. Administration on federal records that Trump removed from the White House when he left office on January 20, 2021.
According to a May 2021 letter reported by the Washington Post, Nara’s chief lawyer, Gary Stern, Mr. Trump collected approximately 24 boxes of documents, official presidential records that by law are the property of the US government, at the residence of the White House during the course of his mandate.
Stern wrote that the boxes in question “had not been transferred to NARA” when Trump left office despite a determination by then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone that the documents Trump had gathered belonged in the archives.
The missing records, which Mr Trump had sent to his home at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach mansion-turned-private-club where he maintains his primary residence and government-funded post-presidential office, became subject of long negotiations between the former president and the government he led.
Mr. Trump eventually agreed to hand over roughly 15 boxes of records to Nara in January 2022, a full year after his term ended along with his legal ability to hold any presidential records.
But the transfer of those 15 boxes raised even more unresolved questions after Nara officials discovered that many of the papers they contained bore markings indicating they were highly classified, and some records were so sensitive that they are normally stored and are handled in specialized rooms. built to government security specifications known as sensitive compartmentalized information facilities.
In February 2022, Nara officials informed the Justice Department that it had recovered classified documents from Mr. Trump’s recovered boxes. The department then opened an investigation and asked Nara for access to the boxes so that FBI and Intelligence Community officials could conduct a review of the documents.
The affidavit reveals Nara’s referral told the Justice Department that the boxes recovered from Mar-a-Lago contained “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous prints, memos, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records and” a large amount of classified records'” and noted that the classified documents were “unfolded, mixed with other records, and otherwise improperly placed. [sic] identified”.
The agent wrote that this development was “of the greatest concern” to Nara.
According to a May 2022 letter from Acting US Archivist Debra Wall to Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran, the White House counsel’s office asked Nara to provide access to the ‘FBI in the boxes. Under the Presidential Records Act, the sitting president must consent to anyone having access to the presidential records of a recently departed administration, and must also consult with the former president whose records must access.
Ms. Wall wrote that the records in question included “100 documents with classification marks, comprising more than 700 pages” with some documents bearing marks indicating “the highest levels of classification, including Special Access Program materials ( SAP)”.
The May 2022 letter, which was made public by a conservative journalist who is also one of Trump’s official representatives at Nara, shows that Trump’s lawyers were reluctant to consent to the FBI’s review of the documents . They tried to invoke executive privilege, a legal doctrine that protects deliberations between and among a president and his advisers, to prevent the FBI from seeing the records.
But Ms. Wall, citing advice from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said there was no basis for Trump to block the FBI from seeing the documents using executive privilege because the FBI is part of the power executive
“The question in this case is not close,” he wrote. “The executive branch here is seeking access to records that belong to and are in the custody of the federal government itself, not only to investigate whether those records were handled illegally but also, as the Homeland Security Division explained , by ‘conduct…