The launch of a affidavit drawn up that the Justice Department used to obtain a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home has shed new light on the federal investigation into the handling of documents from his White House.
The court presentation unsealed On Friday he went into previously unknown details about classified information found in boxes recovered from Trump’s Florida resort in January. It also reaffirmed aspects of the timeline of how the investigation unfolded.
The filing shows, among other things, that the documents that may have been illegally mishandled at Mar-a-Lago contained some of America’s most sensitive secrets.
here are some key takeaways from the newly published document:
The FBI said there was likely “obstruction evidence” and classified defense documents
The FBI told US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart that the search would likely find “evidence of obstruction” in addition to his explanation to the court that there was “probable cause to believe” that classified national security materials were improperly brought to “unauthorized” locations at Trump’s. complex
The FBI found 184 classified documents from 15 boxes earlier this year
In May, when the FBI reviewed the 15 boxes the National Archives recovered from the Florida complex in January, it found “184 unique documents with classification marks,” the affidavit said.
Among the materials were “67 documents marked CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked SECRET, and 25 documents marked TOP SECRET,” according to the filing.
New details on how the Justice Department got involved in the document altercation in the first place
The FBI investigation began after a criminal referral from the National Archives, dated February 2. 9, in which Archives said the boxes contained “many classified records.”
The Archives official said there was “significant concern” that “highly classified records were…mixed with other records” and were not properly identified.
Newsrooms keep obstruction evidence secret for now
The third potential offense, obstruction, which was cited by the warrant materials does not have a corresponding unedited caption on the affidavit. The FBI would have had to provide the court with its explanation for why it believed there was likely evidence of that crime at Mar-a-Lago, so the absence of unredacted details about that evidence indicates that part of the department is particularly sensitive. that aspect of his research be made public.
DOJ keeps details about the personnel involved near the chest
The department said in its legal brief justifying the memos that FBI personnel who had already been identified as involved in the investigation had received “threats of violence from members of the public.”
The FBI told the judge that “[m]”Or but important” wordings on the affidavit were needed to “protect the safety of law enforcement personnel.”
CNN’s Jeremy Herb and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.
