The Mar-a-Lago Affidavit: Read It For Yourself
The redacted Mar-a-Lago affidavit that precipitated the search warrant execution at former President Donald Trump’s Florida Property has been release.
AFFIDAVITA heavily redacted version of the affidavit explaining the justification for an FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago estate was released Friday by the Justice Department.
The heavily blacked-out document reveals some of the reasoning behind the FBI’s decision to execute a warrant on Trump’s property.
In part of the legal filing, written by an undisclosed FBI agent in charge of the investigation, the DOJ said a preliminary review of 15 boxes of records obtained from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in 2021 raised concerns.
“A preliminary review of the (fifteen boxes) indicated that they contained newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and postpresidential records, and ‘a lot of classified records.’ Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified,” the agent wrote.
Within those 15 boxes were 184 unique classified documents, including 64 marked as Confidential, 92 marked as Secret and 25 labeled as Top Secret. Many of the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago before the warrant had Trump’s hand-written notes on them.
Although the document contained explicit references to why the DOJ believed there were more classified documents at the estate after Trump attorneys said they had all been removed, those sections were blacked out entirely.
The agent noted, however, that after Trump left office, no portion of Mar-a-Lago was sanctioned as a storage facility for classified documents.
“I do not believe that any spaces within the (premises) have been authorized for the storage of classified information at least since the end of FPOTUS ‘s Presidential Administration on January 20, 2021,” according to the affidavit.
In a special note, the DOJ requested that all documents filed in support of the affidavit — including the application itself and the search warrant produced in response to the probable cause found in it — be sealed.
“I believe that sealing this document is necessary because the items and information to be seized are relevant to an ongoing investigation and the FBI has not yet identified all potential criminal confederates nor located all evidence related to its investigation,” the affidavit reads.
The document offers some new details and supports previous reporting about an ongoing criminal investigation that has brought fresh legal peril for Trump just as he lays the groundwork for another presidential run. Though Justice Department officials are expected to have removed sensitive details about witnesses, and the scope and direction of the probe, the affidavit may offer the fullest explanation yet about the events leading up to the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
The document being released is the redacted form of an affidavit, or sworn statement, that the FBI submitted to a judge so it could obtain a warrant to search Trump’s property. Affidavits typically contain vital information about an investigation, with agents spelling out to a judge the justification for why they want to search a particular property and why they believe they’re likely to find evidence of a potential crime there. But affidavits routinely remain sealed during pending investigations, making the judge’s decision to reveal portions of it all the more striking.
What ever you think Trump did, the reality is always is worse.Report
And yet our systems never seems to be able to hold him to account.Report
So, Trump’s lawyers appear to have lied to NARA and the FBI about what he had or didn’t have.
There was a filter team on the ground looking things over for attorney client privilege concerns.
There were classified materials in Trump’s possession after he left office.
And the best portions were blacked out.
Exactly what we expected.
And unlikely to change anyone’s narrative.Report
Well, its not like there were foreign spies roaming around a place where our nations’ most sensitive secrets were in an unlocked storeroom, right?
Wait hold on, I’m getting an update…Report
One of the footnotes lead to this spy case: https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/squillacote-v-united-states-opposition.
It’s a fascinating read because, summarized:
1) they started their plan in the 1980s to spy for East Germany, but by the time they had a job ‘on the inside’ it was 1991(!)
2) their East German handler didn’t miss a beat and went right to work for the KGB, but in turn was arrested by the Germans about a year later.
3) the Americans regained contact with the ex-East German guy *after* he was released from jail.
4) the Americans decide they really want to still be good commies, and really want to spy, so they decide to spy for the Communist Party of South Africa. Thus, they reach out to a government official there, but by this time it’s *1995* and not only is apartheid no more, the ANC is in charge and Mandela was President already,
5) the ‘government official’ from South Africa who wrote them back was, of course, really a US FBI agent. The FBI agent winds up not even having to ask for anything, the American spies just give the agent what they had access to. (Which were mostly force assessments for budgeting decisions, which, funny enough – and argued by the defense – would have probably been declassified anyway within a year when that budget was passed and everyone would be able to read it.)Report
It seems like everyone is out of jail now because enough time has passed, but one of them is still active in Washington DC area Democratic Socialists of America politics, based on some sort of ‘socialism wiki’ I came across.Report
There’s enough redacted out of here that there’s just not a lot of meaningful commentary for any of us to offer. That ought to be a surprise to no one.
It is worth noting (as did Philip H above) that a privilege screen crew was on the premises during the execution of the search warrant, and (as Philip H also notes) not everything that the Trump people have been telling us about the early handling of the documents is consistent with what the Government says here. Wow. Imagine that.
I’ll close with an excerpt of a mutually-exasperated conversation my father and I had in 2016 during the election. Background: my father worked on a classified military program for most of my childhood and some of my young adulthood; later in life, he worked on additional classified programs in a related field of defense. Our conversation went something like this: “Dad, you don’t think Trump himself is a security risk? With his personal history? With his business networks not even being held in a blind trust if he gets elected?” “Son, all I can tell you is, if I had done what Hillary Clinton had done with her classified documents and e-mails, I’d be in jail right now. I can’t possibly vote for her knowing what I know about how she dealt with our secrets.”
My father is, today, outraged at the search warrant and the awful, political way that the government is treating former President Trump. Who he now says he never liked at all. Well, okay. I can see voting for someone you don’t actually like, especially if you think the other plausible candidate is worse.Report
Affidavit is better than none.Report
NIce!Report