Trump Search Live Updates: Documents at Mar-a-Lago Included Top Secret Information

 

Trump Search Live Updates: Documents at Mar-a-Lago Included Top Secret Information

 

A redacted affidavit released on Friday said the former president took highly classified national security documents from the White House. Senator Mark Warner, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, called for an assessment of the damages posed by the mishandling of information.

 

Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/26/us/trump-warrant-affidavit

 

Documents at Mar-a-Lago could compromise human intelligence sources, redacted affidavit says.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department asked to search President Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence after retrieving an initial batch of highly classified national security documents, out of concern that their disclosure could compromise “clandestine human sources” used in intelligence gathering, according to a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the warrant.

 

The affidavit — including more than three dozen pages of evidence and legal arguments presented by the Justice Department’s national security division plus supporting documents — describes the government’s monthslong push to recover highly classified materials taken from the White House by a former president who viewed state documents as his private property.

 

And for the first time it reveals the government’s source for information on the movement of documents into, and within, the Mar-a-Lago complex, “a significant number of civilian witnesses” with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s post-presidential actions.

 

The heavily redacted affidavit was released on Friday, 18 days after F.B.I. agents descended on Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club with a court-authorized search warrant and carted off additional material marked as classified, citing possible violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice statutes.

 

There is “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found” at Mr. Trump’s house, prosecutors wrote in requesting the search.

 

Under orders from the judge in the case, Bruce E. Reinhart, the Justice Department had proposed extensive redactions to the affidavit in an effort to shield witnesses from intimidation or retribution. The government did so to protect the broader integrity of its inquiry into whether Mr. Trump had violated the Espionage Act and other laws by willfully retaining national security records that he was required to turn over to the National Archives.

 

While the government redacted details pertaining to witnesses in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, the affidavit vividly describes the dangers posed if their identities, or even actions, were made public.  

“First and foremost, the government must protect the identity of witnesses at this stage of the investigation to ensure their safety,” two department lawyers wrote in explaining their redaction requests.

 

Witnesses, they wrote, could be subjected “retaliation, intimidation, or harassment, and even threats to their physical safety”  — adding that Judge Reinhart himself had already noted those dangers were “not hypothetical in this case.”

 

The search, the affidavit reveals, was prompted by an intensive F.B.I. review of an initial 15 boxes of materials that Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, after months of government pressure.

 

In those boxes, they found a total of 184 documents with classification markings, including 25 marked “top secret.” 

But agents were most alarmed to discover that many of the materials included the highest national security restrictions, requiring they be held in controlled government storage facilities, and barring them from ever being shared with foreign governments, to protect “clandestine human sources” employed by the intelligence community to collect information around the world, according to the documents.

 

The affidavit does not disclose the nature of the material or why Mr. Trump chose to retain it.

 

Those concerns, and the continued unwillingness of Mr. Trump to return sensitive documents that the archives knew remained in his possession, prompted the department’s leaders to move quickly, according to officials.

 

The redactions, which blanket about half of the affidavit, covered many of the most sensitive details of the Justice Department’s investigation; whole swaths of the filing are blacked out, included most of pages 11 through 16. As a result, there are limited references to the witnesses or investigative methods that led to the findings laid out by lawyers with the department’s national security division, who persuaded Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to sign off on the highly unusual request for a search.

 

On Friday morning, before the documents were released, Mr. Trump attacked the department on Truth Social, the social media platform he uses to communicate since being banned from Twitter after the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. He called the Justice Department and the F.B.I. “political Hacks and Thugs” who “had no right under the Presidential Records Act to storm Mar-a-Lago and steal everything in sight, including Passports and privileged documents.”

 

The fact that any of the affidavit was made public is a remarkable turn of events. Such documents are almost always left entirely sealed until criminal charges are filed, and even then they tend to emerge only as important legal issues in a case are litigated. There is no indication the Justice Department plans to file charges in the documents case anytime soon.

 

The partial release came after several news organizations, including The New York Times, filed a motion this month asking Judge Reinhart to unseal the entire document, citing enormous public interest in the search of Mar-a-Lago.

 

The Justice Department responded by saying the affidavit, if unsealed, would provide a road map to its investigation and wanted Judge Reinhart to keep it fully under wraps. Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not object, to the astonishment of Mr. Garland’s team, who believe the disclosures portray the former president’s actions in a deeply unflattering light.

 

At a hearing last week, Judge Reinhart, apparently seeking a middle ground, floated the idea of releasing portions of the affidavit. He ordered the government to send proposed redactions to him by Thursday at noon and issued his decision to release the redacted version within hours. 

Justice Department officials had suggested they would push hard to scrub anything that could expose witnesses in the case. After the search at Mar-a-Lago, the F.B.I. reported a surge in threats against its agents; an armed man tried to breach the bureau’s Cincinnati field office before being killed in a shootout with the local police.

 

The Trump team has sought to portray the search as unjust and unnecessary, claiming there were continuing talks between Mr. Trump’s side and the Justice Department that led to the first tranche of boxes of documents being returned to the archives in January.

 

But when archives officials retrieved the 15 boxes of material in January, they opened them to find mountains of paper, more than 700 pages of classified documents because some individual documents contained multiple pages, some the most sensitive and restricted that exist in government, known as Special Access Programs.

 

The archives alerted the Justice Department soon after with a referral, and a grand jury was convened.

 

The released affidavit does not reveal the amount of classified material turned over to federal officials during a June 3 meeting between Justice Department officials and Mr. Trump’s lawyers, which came after the grand jury had been formed.

 

Mr. Trump repeatedly resisted entreaties from several advisers to turn over the material, as early as last summer, according to multiple people briefed on the matter. “They’re mine,” he said of the boxes, according to three people familiar with what took place.

 

Mr. Trump went through at least some of the boxes in late 2021, although it is unclear if he went through them all.

 

His lead lawyers in the case met on June 3 with Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterespionage section of the national security division at the Justice Department. Shortly before that meeting, Mr. Corcoran went to the basement to search through the boxes for classified material, according to two people briefed on the matter.

 

The Justice Department also gathered information from at least one witness suggesting that there might be more presidential material at Mar-a-Lago. On June 22, the department subpoenaed surveillance footage from various places in the club, including the hallway outside a basement storage area where Mr. Corcoran and Ms. Bobb had led Mr. Bratt nearly three weeks earlier to show him where documents had been kept.

 

The video showed boxes being moved out of the storage room sometime around the contact from the Justice Department, people familiar with the tapes said. And it also showed boxes being slipped into different containers, which alarmed investigators.

 

On Aug. 8, investigators found additional material, presidential records and classified documents in the basement area, as well as in a container on the floor of Mr. Trump’s closet in his office, a former dressing room in the bridal suite above the club’s ballroom.

 

The closet had a hotel-style safe, but it did not contain the materials investigators sought, and was too small to hold the documents he had, according to several people familiar with the events.