MAR-A-LAGO REDACTED SEARCH AFFIDAVIT RELEASED – LINK TO AFFIDAVIT IN STORY
WASHINGTON — A 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.
