Affadavit Pdf Continue Service During Ongoging Investigation
These are the main takeaways from the affidavit used to justify the F.B.I.'s search of Mar-a-Lago.
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The release on Friday of a partly redacted affidavit used by the Justice Department to justify its search of former President Donald J. Trump's Florida residence included information that provides greater insight into the ongoing investigation into how he handled sensitive national security documents he took with him from the White House.
Here are key takeaways:
The government tried to retrieve the documents for more than a year.
At the beginning, the National Archives and the Justice Department sought to resolve the situation through communication and negotiation, focusing primarily on retrieving and securing sensitive documents and other presidential records.
The affidavit showed that the archives asked Mr. Trump in May 2021, a few months after he left office, for any documents that he might have taken with him that needed to be returned to the federal government under the terms of the Presidential Records Act.
Seven months later, in late December, Mr. Trump's representatives told the agency that it had a dozen boxes at Mar-a-Lago that were ready to be retrieved. In January, the archives collected what were actually 15 boxes.
The affidavit included a letter from May 2022 that showed that Mr. Trump's lawyers knew that he might be in possession of classified materials, that the government still wanted them back and that Justice Department was investigating the matter.
Mr. Trump's aides turned over more documents in June. But the Justice Department was interviewing witnesses about the matter, and came to believe that Mr. Trump was in possession of still more classified materials. It was then that prosecutors went to a federal judge this summer, saying it had probable cause to carry out a search of Mar-a-Lago. The search turned up a trove of highly sensitive documents.
The material included highly classified documents.
The F.B.I. said it had examined the 15 boxes Mr. Trump had returned to the National Archives in January and that all but one of them contained documents that were classified. In all, the agents found 184 documents that were marked classified — 92 of which were marked "SECRET" and 25 of which were marked "TOP SECRET."
The affidavit did not disclose the contents of any of the documents or specify the subject matter they addressed, and the Justice Department has not addressed what risk there could be to national security if any of the documents were to fall into the hands of rival nations. But the classification markings they carried suggested that some could reveal clandestine human intelligence sources and that others were derived from national security surveillance.
Some materials were marked "NOFORN," meaning that they cannot be legally shared with a foreign government and others "SI," an abbreviation for special technical and intelligence information related to surveillance of foreign communications.
Prosecutors are concerned about obstruction and witness intimidation.
To obtain the search warrant, the Justice Department had to lay out to a judge possible crimes, and obstruction of justice was among them.
There is "probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found" at Mr. Trump's house, the Justice Department wrote in its request for the search.
In a supporting document, the Justice Department said it had "well-founded concerns that steps may be taken to frustrate or otherwise interfere with this investigation if facts in the affidavit were prematurely disclosed."
Mr. Trump has had a pattern throughout his presidency of taking actions that raise questions about whether he is trying to interfere with law enforcement investigations of him and his closest allies. Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, raised the possibility that Mr. Trump had obstructed justice in that inquiry, though Mr. Trump was never charged. More recently, members of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks and what led to them raised questions about whether Mr. Trump or his allies were trying to intimidate witnesses.
Aug. 26, 2022, 7:09 p.m. ET
Republicans, once outraged by the Mar-a-Lago search, become quieter as details emerge.
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In the minutes and hours after the F.B.I.'s search of former President Donald J. Trump's residence in Florida this month, his supporters did not hesitate to denounce what they saw as a blatant abuse of power and outrageous politicization of the Justice Department.
But with the release of a redacted affidavit detailing the justification for the search, the former president's allies were largely silent, a potentially telling reaction with ramifications for his political future.
"I would just caution folks not to draw too many conclusions," Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, said on Fox News. It was a starkly different admonition from his earlier condemnations of what he said were "politically motivated actions."
Some Republicans will no doubt rally around Mr. Trump and his claim that he is once again being targeted by a rogue F.B.I. that is still out to get him. His former acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Twitter that "this raid was, in fact, just about documents," which he called "simply outrageous." Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona and an ardent Trump ally, was on the right-wing broadcaster Newsmax denouncing the F.B.I. as politically biased, though he notably did not defend the former president's possession of highly classified documents.
But generally, even the most bombastic Republicans — Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Jim Jordan of Ohio — were at least initially focused elsewhere. Ms. Greene was posting on Friday about border "invasions." Ms. Boebert noted on Twitter the anniversary of the suicide bombing of U.S. service members at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. Mr. Jordan was focused on an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder. None tweeted about the affidavit.
The accusations against Mr. Trump have become increasingly serious.
Classified documents dealing with matters such as Mr. Trump's correspondences with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un were stored in unsecured rooms at Mar-a-Lago, The New York Times reported this month. The untempered attacks on the F.B.I. after the initial search led to threats against federal law enforcement, opening up Republicans — long the self-proclaimed party of law and order — to charges from Democrats that they were trying to "defund" the agency.
And voters are again distracted by Mr. Trump in the political spotlight, even as Republicans try to direct their attention toward the economy and soaring inflation on a day when the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell said efforts to control rising prices would exact pain on Americans.
All of this could mean that enough Republican voters grow weary of the division and drama around Mr. Trump and are ready to move on.
Little wonder, then, that Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's adviser and deputy chief of staff, took to Fox News on Friday afternoon to plead for Mr. Trump to stop commenting on the F.B.I. investigation, for his own good and the good of his party.
"Let the election conversation get back to what it ought to be about," Mr. Rove said, "which is about inflation and the economy and the direction of the country and people's views of President Biden's competence."
Aug. 26, 2022, 6:55 p.m. ET
Biden details when presidents can take home classified documents.
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President Biden said Friday that presidents can take home classified documents, when they are kept secure.
He said he was taking his daily intelligence briefing, a report that usually details global affairs and national security threats, to a secure space in his home on Friday.
"It's locked," he said of the brief. "I have a person with me — military with me — I read it, I lock it back up, and give it to the military."
At the end of his time in office, President Donald J. Trump took home hundreds of classified documents, according the National Archives and Records Administration, which referred the matter to the Department of Justice. That eventually resulted in a raid on Mr. Trump's Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, and growing allegations that the former U.S. leader may have violated the Espionage Act and obstructed justice.
Released on Friday, a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant for Mr. Trump's Florida residence said the department initially reviewed 15 boxes of documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, including 184 that were marked classified and 25 marked top secret, which requires them to be held in secure government facilities.
Most alarming to agents was the fact that some information, if disclosed, could compromise the government's human intelligence sources. Also concerning was the fact that material had been stored primarily in a basement room at Mar-a-Lago that was not equipped with the security that government officials afford classified documents.
Mr. Biden on Friday seemed more critical of Mr. Trump's assertion that he had used his power as president to declassify all of the documents that the F.B.I. retrieved in the search, a claim that would be difficult to prove or disprove. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump is suggesting that he followed normal procedures to declassify the documents or that he made a blanket, oral invocation.
"I've declassified everything in the world. I'm president," Mr. Biden scoffed when asked about that claim. "Come on."
But even if Mr. Trump had declassified those documents, he could still have violated the Espionage Act, one of the laws cited in the search warrant. The Espionage Act does not make reference to whether a document is or is not classified. Instead, it makes it a crime to retain, without authorization, documents related to the national defense that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.
Mr. Biden declined to comment further on Mr. Trump's claim that he had declassified the documents, saying, "I'll let the Justice Department take care of it."
The president has in the past been critical of Mr. Trump's handling of sensitive information, even barring him from receiving the intelligence briefings that are traditionally given to former presidents because he was concerned about his "erratic behavior."
A tightly restricted process that adheres to rules set out in the Presidential Records Act of 1978 governs how former presidents can receive documents. For example, while writing his 2020 memoir, Barack Obama would be brought documents on a secure laptop, or paper documents would be placed in a locked bag.
Aug. 26, 2022, 6:20 p.m. ET
The Mar-a-Lago search followed many attempts to secure documents.
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When the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald J. Trump's home and club in Florida, on Aug. 8 and carted off several boxes of sensitive documents, it was only after government officials had spent more than a year using various — and far less invasive — means of trying to secure the materials or get them back.
The redacted affidavit released on Friday and previous disclosures about the course of the effort to identify and retrieve any official material Mr. Trump improperly held on to after leaving the White House make it clear that the National Archives and the Justice Department had worked to try to resolve the matter without resorting to a step as confrontational as seeking and carrying out a court-ordered search warrant.
Archivists provided lists of missing items. Letters were exchanged, and lawyers conducted negotiations. A delegation of Justice Department officials traveled to Mar-a-Lago in June, where they were greeted briefly by Mr. Trump. Only after officials came to believe that Mr. Trump and his team were not being fully forthcoming did the Justice Department decide this summer to escalate.
As early as May 2021, the National Archives sent an email to a group of lawyers who had worked with Mr. Trump, asking for their "immediate assistance" in retrieving more than two dozen boxes of the former president's records, including some of his correspondence with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and a letter that President Barack Obama had left for Mr. Trump on his first day in office.
In the email, the top lawyer at the archives, Gary M. Stern, said that his agency had never received the materials even though Mr. Trump's top White House lawyer had determined that they should have been turned over.
The archives "continued to make requests" to Mr. Trump and his legal team to return the documents until about late December 2021, according to the affidavit. A few weeks later, on Jan. 18 the affidavit said, the archives finally received 15 boxes of materials from Mar-a-Lago.
When the archives conducted a preliminary review of the materials, officials discovered that among the newspapers, magazines and presidential correspondence were "a lot of classified records," some of them marked with labels like top secret or sensitive compartmented information, the affidavit said.
At that point, the archives informed the Justice Department about their discovery, prompting officials there to ask the White House for permission to let the F.B.I. take a look at the materials so that federal agents and the intelligence community could examine them, according to a letter the archives sent to M. Evan Corcoran, one of Mr. Trump's lawyers, in May.
In the letter, the archives repeated concerns, first aired by the Justice Department, that there were "important national security interests in the F.B.I. and others in the intelligence community getting access to these materials."
But the security assessment was delayed, the letter said, because Mr. Corcoran and other lawyers for Mr. Trump were negotiating for time to ascertain whether any of the documents were shielded by executive privilege. The F.B.I. was finally able to look at the documents and conduct its own review, from May 16 to May 18, after the archives, the Justice Department and the White House all agreed that Mr. Trump could not assert executive privilege over the materials.
Around the same time — on May 11 — Mr. Trump's office received a grand jury subpoena seeking the return of any "documents bearing classification markings" that he still had in his possession, according to a lawsuit the former president filed seeking the appointment of an independent arbiter to review the material. On June 3, the lawsuit said, Mr. Trump and his lawyers met with federal prosecutors at Mar-a-Lago, and they retrieved more documents and inspected a storage room at the estate where Mr. Trump had been keeping the material.
Five days after the Mar-a-Lago visit, the Justice Department sent one of Mr. Trump's lawyers a letter, warning that the private club did not have "a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information" and that documents had not been "handled in an appropriate manner" since Mr. Trump had left the White House. The letter asked the lawyer to secure the storage room and to ensure that all of the boxes moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago "be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice."
Even that was not the end of the government's attempts to make sure that the classified documents were secure. On June 22, prosecutors subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago's security footage, which included a well-trafficked hallway outside the storage area.
And the inquiry is apparently continuing.
The newly released affidavit said that federal agents had "not yet identified all potential criminal confederates nor located all evidence related to its investigation."
Aug. 26, 2022, 6:08 p.m. ET
As the affidavit is released, Trump directs focus to the judge who signed the warrant.
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Less than an hour after a heavily redacted copy of the affidavit used to justify the F.B.I.'s search of former President Donald J. Trump's residence in Florida was released on Friday, he and many of his allies were directing their ire toward the judge who signed the warrant.
In a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, Mr. Trump named Judge Bruce Reinhart and falsely described the search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8 to retrieve classified documents as a "break-in of my home."
Since it was revealed that Judge Reinhart authorized the search, he has faced a wave of disinformation and online threats from right-wing critics.
Over the past few weeks, Judge Reinhart has faced antisemitic threats online; the synagogue he attends reportedly canceled a beachside service two weeks ago out of concern for the safety of its congregants. Mr. Trump's defenders have also accused the judge of political bias in carrying out what legal experts describe as a decision typical of his duties as a magistrate judge.
With his Truth Social post on Friday, Mr. Trump encouraged the focus on Judge Reinhart, suggesting that he should have recused himself from the case.
A day earlier, Tea Party Patriots Action, an advocacy group registered as a nonprofit social welfare organization, filed a complaint against the judge claiming judicial misconduct and calling for his firing.
The complaint, filed before the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which oversees the Southern District of Florida, says that Judge Reinhart "publicly denigrated" Mr. Trump in the past. The claim refers to a purported Facebook post by the judge in 2016 that has been removed from the site. The New York Times could not independently verify the post.
The complaint attacks his ethics for his work in the private sector representing former employees of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019. It also notes that Judge Reinhart donated money to President Barack Obama, a Democrat, in 2008, as well as Jeb Bush, the Republican former governor of Florida, in 2015 And the filing notes that Judge Reinhart recused himself in June from a federal lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee related to allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Although the judge did not indicate in his recusal his specific reasons for doing so, the fact that he took that step encouraged some on the right — including Mr. Trump — to suggest that he should have also recused himself from adjudicating the search warrant application. Federal code provides a number of reasons for recusal, including conflict of interest, personal bias and financial or professional interest.
The renewed attacks are the latest turn in a tumultuous few weeks for Judge Reinhart. A week ago, a spokesperson for Mr. Trump praised the judge for his insistence that the Justice Department release the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant.
The heavily redacted affidavit released on Friday revealed that the Justice Department asked to search Mr. Trump's home after retrieving a batch of highly classified national security documents in January. The document shows that officials were concerned that the classified material could compromise "clandestine human sources" used in intelligence gathering.
Aug. 26, 2022, 5:31 p.m. ET
Agency rebuts Trump's claim that it packed boxes of material he took from White House.
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The General Services Administration, the federal agency charged with managing the government's property, rebutted on Friday a claim made by former President Donald J. Trump's aides that the agency had improperly packed hundreds of pages of documents with classified markings that were sent from the White House to Mr. Trump's home in Florida when he left office.
The agency said that it had no role in packing the boxes.
In the aftermath of the F.B.I.'s search of Mr. Trump's property two weeks ago, a top aide to Mr. Trump, Kashyap Patel, said Mr. Trump had done nothing wrong and that "the G.S.A., not Trump, had mishandled the packaging of the documents."
"And it's key to note that the G.S.A., the Government Service Administration, they're the ones who packed up and moved these documents," Mr. Patel said Aug. 15 on "The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show."
Around the same time, Mr. Trump's spokesman told NBC News that the former president was working to ensure that "any items improperly moved by the General Services Administration were appropriately returned."
The G.S.A.'s spokeswoman, Christina Wilkes said Friday that as is typical, "Members of the outgoing presidential transition team and their volunteers were responsible for packing items from the outgoing transition space into boxes." She added, that "in this particular instance, the outgoing transition team was responsible for putting the boxes on pallets and shrink-wrapping each pallet."
The agency said that while it was in charge of moving the boxes after they were packed, its personnel never examined the contents of the boxes, nor did it have any idea what was in them.
"As part of the services and support G.S.A. provides to all outgoing presidents, G.S.A. typically contracts for the transportation of items identified by the outgoing president as necessary to wind down the affairs of their office," the agency said. "G.S.A. entered into a support contract in this particular instance for shipping of the pallets from Virginia to Florida — not for the packing of the boxes."
Before the items were shipped by the G.S.A., it required members of Mr. Trump's transition team "to certify in writing that the items being shipped were required to wind down the Office of the Former President and would be utilized as the office transitioned to its new location in Florida."
The agency declined to say who on Mr. Trump's transition team attested to that or what they specifically said about the items being moved.
Aug. 26, 2022, 4:39 p.m. ET
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she's glad the affidavit was released with the Justice Department's sources and methods redacted, while releasing some information for the public. "It's important for us to know how at risk our national security was," she told reporters in San Francisco.
Aug. 26, 2022, 4:00 p.m. ET
The Espionage Act appears to be a focus of the investigation.
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The Espionage Act, a World War I-era law once used to stamp out dissent, eventually became the government's legal tool of choice against spies and unauthorized leakers. But now former President Donald J. Trump faces questions about whether he violated the act, after the F.B.I. seized top secret documents that he had taken to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917 at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. In a bid to quell dissent against the United States' support for World War I, the act prohibited obtaining or disclosing information related to national defense if it could be used at the expense of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.
In recent years, some on the left have criticized the law, saying it was used to prosecute people who leaked government secrets. Now Republicans are denouncing the act after the Justice Department referred to it in its search warrant to retrieve documents from Mr. Trump's home in Palm Beach, Fla., including some that were marked classified.
Aug. 26, 2022, 3:29 p.m. ET
The affidavit puts focus on the question of obstruction.
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The question of obstruction was front and center when the affidavit for the federal search warrant to look at former President Donald J. Trump's property was in part made public on Friday.
A statute related to obstruction was among those used to underpin the case for a warrant. Questions have emerged about whether Mr. Trump or his team were obstructing the investigation into additional documents.
"There is probable cause to believe that additional documents that contain classified NDI or that are presidential records subject to record retention requirements currently remain at the premises," read one section of the affidavit, which used an abbreviation for national defense information. "There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the premises."
The redacted affidavit did not offer details of what the possible obstruction might be. But officials had earlier received a written statement signed by at least one Trump lawyer on June 3, saying that, to the best of their knowledge, there had been a search and all classified material sought in a May 11 subpoena had been returned.
That statement, along with visuals from surveillance camera footage of the property that federal officials captured and witness interviews, were said to be part of the concerns among investigators about obstruction.
Aug. 26, 2022, 3:20 p.m. ET
The National Archives sought more than 700 pages of classified documents from Trump.
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Former President Donald J. Trump took more than 700 pages of classified documents, including some related to the nation's most covert intelligence operations, to his private club and residence in Florida when he left the White House in January 2021, according to a letter that the National Archives sent to his lawyers this year.
The letter, dated May 10 and written to one of Mr. Trump's lawyers by the acting U.S. archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, confirmed that the former president had kept at Mar-a-Lago documents related to Special Access Programs, some of the nation's most closely held secrets, before the F.B.I. searched the property.
According to the letter, communications between the National Archives and representatives of Mr. Trump resulted in the archives retrieving 15 boxes of materials in January, some of them containing highly classified information marked top secret and others that were related to Special Access Programs.
The New York Times previously reported that the National Archives had found more than 150 sensitive documents when it got that first batch of material, helping to explain the Justice Department's urgent response, which culminated in the serving of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8.
Even after the archives retrieved the first batch of records, Ms. Wall's letter said, Mr. Trump's lawyers, in consultation with the White House Counsel's Office, asked for time to determine whether — and how many of — the documents were protected by executive privilege, leading to negotiations that delayed the F.B.I., the Justice Department and the intelligence community from assessing the materials.
Mr. Trump's lawyers have also filed a legal motion asking a federal judge in Florida to appoint an independent arbiter, known as a special master, to weed out any documents protected by executive privilege from the trove that was removed during the F.B.I. search.
Aug. 26, 2022, 2:16 p.m. ET
The affidavit says that Evan Corcoran, Trump's lawyer, asked the Justice Department about "public reports" of an investigation and documents "purportedly" marked as classified. There had been a back and forth between the Justice Department and Trump's attorneys by then, but Corcoran tried to make it sound as if he was learning things from the press. Interestingly, he described the documents with classified markings as packed "unknowingly" and sent to Mar-a-Lago.
Aug. 26, 2022, 2:01 p.m. ET
Trump is sitting on tens of millions of dollars in political money in a non-campaign account and is still the lead in Republican primary polls for the nomination. The people around him say he is almost certain to run and take offense when anyone hints otherwise. In the weeks since the F.B.I. search, several Republicans have denounced the search.
Aug. 26, 2022, 1:48 p.m. ET
What a small group of Trump advisers has been focused on is not the propriety of having government documents that were sought for return, or the risk of keeping highly sensitive material in unsecured places, but the simple question of whether Trump will face charges. It gets lost that that is the framework through which Trump sees almost any investigation: the threat level.
Aug. 26, 2022, 1:33 p.m. ET
Speculation has swirled about the source of the information that led to the search. Tucked into the legal memo justifying the warrant is a line that reveals, for the first time, that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department spoke to "a significant number of civilian witnesses" about Trump's actions. That, perhaps more than any revelation, is likely to draw Trump's attention.
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Aug. 26, 2022, 1:31 p.m. ET
The affidavit provides no indication of whether, or when, charges might be filed, but it does say that prosecutors requesting to search Trump's residence had "probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found."
Aug. 26, 2022, 1:22 p.m. ET
Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the affidavit seemed to show that "some of our most sensitive intelligence" was improperly handled. He called for the Justice Department investigation to proceed without interference and reiterated the committee's bipartisan request for an assessment of the damages posed by the mishandling of information.
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Aug. 26, 2022, 1:15 p.m. ET
It's important to note that some Trump allies have tried to suggest that since some of the material was not a presidential-generated record, it therefore doesn't qualify under the Presidential Records Act. But it's still a federal record and could ensnare Trump in a potential violation of the Federal Records Act, which has a stronger enforcement mechanism.
Aug. 26, 2022, 1:08 p.m. ET
The attached motion from the government seeking to keep the rest classified also lays out why the redacted information in the affidavit could be used to identify witnesses cooperating with investigators.
Aug. 26, 2022, 1:06 p.m. ET
In a footnote, the affidavit makes explicit that the law that prohibits the unlawful gathering, transmission or loss of defense information does not use the term "classified information." Rather, it criminalizes "the unlawful retention of 'information related to the national defense.'" This seems to undercut the idea that there is no crime so long as Trump declassified the information before leaving office.
Aug. 26, 2022, 1:05 p.m. ET
In a filing from the Justice Department to the judge explaining their redactions, prosecutors argue that the identities of F.B.I. agents had to be protected. "F.B.I. agents who have been publicly identified in connection with this investigation have received repeated threats of violence from members of the public. Exposure of witnesses' identities would likely erode their trust in the government's investigation, and it would almost certainly chill other potential witnesses from coming forward in this investigation and others."
Aug. 26, 2022, 1:04 p.m. ET
The May letter to Jay Bratt also made the case that Trump is not subject to a law that criminalizes the mishandling of classified information, Section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. Notably, that was not one of the three laws that the search warrant cited and relied upon, suggesting that the Justice Department did not need it and wanted to avoid a fight over whether the classification status of the documents mattered.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:59 p.m. ET
The affidavit shows that the F.B.I. had special procedures to separate any documents that might be subject to attorney-client privilege and keep them inaccessible to the main investigators. A so-called privilege review team would handle such materials before any decision about what to do with them.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:57 p.m. ET
A letter from the Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to Jay Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the national security division at the Justice Department, suggests that Trump had absolute declassification authority. But the letter does not state that Trump actually declassified any of these documents. Instead, the Trump adviser Kash Patel started making that claim around that time.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:52 p.m. ET
A minor piece of the affidavit refers to a note sent to Trump's lawyer saying that the room in the Mar-a-Lago basement where material had been stored was not secure. But the document makes no reference to the "stronger lock" that was supposedly requested, according to some reports.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:48 p.m. ET
After a discussion of early claims that Trump may have declassified anything he took to Mar-a-Lago, the affidavit notes that classification status does not matter for purposes of the Espionage Act. (It criminalizes the unauthorized retention of closely held defense-related information that could aid a foreign adversary or harm the United States. It was enacted before the classification system existed and does not refer to classification status.)
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:47 p.m. ET
An annotation of the affidavit used to search Mar-a-Lago.
Here is an annotation of the full, partly redacted version of the affidavit that federal investigators used to obtain a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald J. Trump's Florida residence.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:46 p.m. ET
The original 15 boxes of information taken from Mar-a-Lago had classified information that had markings showing that the material came from human intelligence sources as well as foreign intercepted communications. Even if they were declassified by Trump, documents that could potentially reveal the method by which intelligence was gathered will be the kind of national defense information that remains sensitive and that the government will take huge steps to protect.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:42 p.m. ET
In May 2022, the F.B.I. reviewed the 15 boxes taken from Mar-a-Lago and found 184 documents marked as classified, including 25 marked as top secret. The affidavit lists acronyms on some of the documents indicating that they were particularly sensitive, including some that pertained to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, a national security law. The agent said those types of documents typically contain national defense information, the sort of government secret that is protected by the Espionage Act.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:38 p.m. ET
A rare, unredacted line in a largely censored set of pages recounting events says that the National Archives made a request for the missing government documents on May 6, 2021, "and continued to make requests until approximately late December 2021," when Trump's office told them they had found 12 boxes that were ready for the agency to retrieve from Mar-a-Lago.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:35 p.m. ET
The affidavit lays out a timeline starting with a criminal referral by the National Archives on Feb. 9, 2022, after it retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago. The affidavit quotes the referral as indicating that the boxes contained "newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential 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."
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:31 p.m. ET
The government filings refer to its "criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of" government records. While none of the statutes in the search warrant refer to classified material, the defense documents covered by the Espionage Act will often involve classified material. There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the premises.
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:22 p.m. ET
The court has unsealed the Justice Department papers related to its justification for continuing to keep large parts of the affidavit redacted. It includes a two-page list of paragraphs it wants to redact, along with justifications. Most of the justifications are redacted except for those involving "agent safety," which must be the names of F.B.I. personnel. Here is a sampling:
Aug. 26, 2022, 12:10 p.m. ET
The public will ultimately decide whether Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, below, was justified in approving the Mar-a-Lago search. But it is important to note that the Justice Department's best arguments supporting it, including the affidavit, are being made public — technically against his wishes (if not his interests). That allows Garland to air his side of the story without being accused of compromising the integrity of the investigation by litigating the case in the news.
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Aug. 26, 2022, 12:09 p.m. ET
Judge Reinhart has ordered the release of documents, motions and orders tied to the request to redact the affidavit, indicating that he wants the public to understand why some of the affidavit is blacked out.
Aug. 26, 2022, 11:59 a.m. ET
One point that Trump allies have made repeatedly is that some of the classified material might not be presidential records, if they originated from the intelligence community. Trump's allies have maintained that he had a "standing order" to declassify documents; their argument is that there's nothing improper. But those records are still government property.
Aug. 26, 2022, 11:28 a.m. ET
Why did Trump resist returning documents? Here are some possibilities.
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The simplest way for former President Donald J. Trump to have avoided what's become a legal conflagration would have been to simply turn over to the National Archives the government papers he'd kept at Mar-a-Lago. So why did he resist doing so?
There is no clear answer, but there are a number of possible reasons: the thrill of holding on to exciting documents, a profound lack of interest in obeying protocols, or because the documents contained details about people he knew.
It is possible that only Mr. Trump knows for sure. It is also possible that he does not: John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump's third national security adviser, said the former president's approach to document management was "sort of whatever he wants to grab for whatever reason."
Mr. Bolton added, "He may not even fully appreciate" precisely why he did certain things.
Aug. 26, 2022, 11:08 a.m. ET
Trump's lawyers face a deadline in their request for a special master to review seized documents.
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Former President Donald J. Trump and his lawyers were due on Friday to file court papers clarifying a request this week seeking an independent arbiter to review the hundreds of pages of sensitive documents that were seized during the search of his Florida residence.
The case was filed separately from the one concerning the release of the redacted affidavit used to justify the search, but the request pertains to the same search.
Mr. Trump's legal team filed on Monday an initial version of the request for the arbiter, known as a special master. In the filing, the former president's lawyers said that one was needed to weed out any records taken by investigators that should have been protected by executive privilege.
But the filing — styled as a "motion for judicial oversight and additional relief" — was so confusing and full of bluster that Judge Aileen M. Cannon issued an unusual order on Tuesday afternoon asking for clarification on several basic legal issues.
As a preliminary matter, Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump and works out of the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., wanted to know why she should have jurisdiction over the filing. Another federal judge, Bruce E. Reinhart, who works in the West Palm Beach federal courthouse, was handling a complex series of issues surrounding the Mar-a-Lago search. Chief among them was the release of the redacted warrant affidavit.
Judge Cannon also asked Mr. Trump's lawyers what exactly they wanted her to do. The original filing seemed, in part, to challenge the search of Mar-a-Lago on Fourth Amendment grounds but never asked for any legal relief based on the amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The papers were filled with complaints that Mr. Trump had often been treated unfairly by the government — and even mentioned the former president's polling numbers — and read more like a news release than a formal court document.
Judge Cannon gave Mr. Trump's lawyers until the end of the day on Friday to answer her questions.
Aug. 26, 2022, 11:02 a.m. ET
It is very unusual for the Justice Department to reveal any part of an affidavit to the public. Generally speaking, affidavits for searches can be important evidence in trials, and the government rarely shares them outside of such a proceeding.
Aug. 26, 2022, 10:43 a.m. ET
Trump's claim that the F.B.I. had no right under the Presidential Records Act to go into Mar-a-Lago is misleading. The search warrant cited the Espionage Act, a law against concealing documents as part of obstruction of justice, and a law against the concealment, removal or mutilation of government-owned records generally.
Aug. 26, 2022, 10:40 a.m. ET
For months, some Trump advisers encouraged him to return the government documents. When the National Archives finally retrieved several boxes of highly sensitive material in January, those same advisers began to take the position privately that the real problem was not that Trump had the documents, but that he had returned any at all, sparking an investigation.
Aug. 26, 2022, 10:37 a.m. ET
How does the government classify its most sensitive information?
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The F.B.I.'s search at former President Donald J. Trump's Florida home on Aug. 8 was driven in part by the government's effort to ensure the security of the nation's most highly sensitive information, including, according to a person briefed on the matter, material designated "Special Access Programs" — a category that limits some to a tiny group of top military and intelligence officials.
Officials left Mar-a-Lago with 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified. One set had the highest level of classification: top secret/sensitive compartmented information.
Historically, Special Access Programs have been reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States, or for closely held technologies and abilities. That could include covert programs against adversaries, or the development of special surveillance and weapons technologies, such as new kinds of stealth aircraft and hypersonic missiles.
But SAPs — as the programs are often called — do not indicate a higher level of classification. Instead, they are intended to limit the number of people who have access to secret or top secret materials. They are created when the sharing of specific information represents a heightened threat of damaging disclosures, or when a "secret" or "top secret" classification is not deemed sufficiently protective.
Information placed within a SAP is available to only a handful of high-level officials, including the president and top national security personnel. As with all highly sensitive intelligence, material designated as SAP is very closely tracked to monitor who has handled the information.
The government inventory of items taken from Mar-a-Lago made no reference to SAP, but some documents were marked "ts/sci," meaning the items are top secret and are supposed to be read only in a secure government facility.
Aug. 26, 2022, 10:28 a.m. ET
On Friday morning, Trump took to Truth Social, the social media platform he uses to communicate, to call the Justice Department and the FBI staff "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."
Aug. 26, 2022, 10:10 a.m. ET
Trump's team has suggested they cooperated when asked to return remaining material. But additional information, including an email from National Archives officials to a Trump lawyer made public this week, has revealed the degree to which Trump was slow-walking federal officials.
Aug. 26, 2022, 10:00 a.m. ET
Presidents from both parties have followed tightly restricted records procedures.
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People familiar with the actions of former President Barack Obama and other recent presidents from both parties described strict procedures to access documents, conforming to rules set out in the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in 1978.
For example, during the three years that Mr. Obama wrote his 768-page memoir after leaving the White House, the millions of pages of his official presidential records were locked away in warehouses in Washington and Chicago.
Each time Mr. Obama wanted to review something, his aides submitted precise requests to the National Archives and Records Administration. Sometimes, documents would be encrypted and loaded onto a laptop that would be brought to Mr. Obama at his office in Washington. Other times, a paper document would be placed in a locked bag for his perusal, and later returned the same way.
The tightly restricted process that Mr. Obama followed to gain access to the 30 million records from his presidency stands in stark contrast to former President Donald J. Trump's seemingly haphazard handling of some of the government's most sensitive documents after he left office in early 2021.
People familiar with the departures of Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and former Presidents George W. Bush, a Republican, and Bill Clinton, a Democrat, said the process of identifying presidential records and sending them to the archives begins months, if not years, before a president leaves the White House for the final time at noon on Jan. 20.
But according to federal officials, dozens of boxes of documents ended up in Mr. Trump's custody.
That is not the way it's supposed to happen.
"At 12:01 on Jan. 20, those documents become property of the United States government," said Lee White, the executive director of the National Coalition for History.
Aug. 26, 2022, 9:38 a.m. ET
Trump's dealings with the National Archives over documents have lasted more than a year.
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Former President Donald J. Trump's dealings with the National Archives, as well as efforts by lawmakers and Justice Department officials to reclaim a variety of sensitive documents from him, began with the day he left office.
2021
Jan. 20: Mr. Trump left the White House on the morning of Inauguration Day. The National Archives later said that at the end of the Trump administration it had received a collection of White House documents, many of which had been torn up and taped back together, and some of which were handed over in scraps.
Talks between the National Archives and Mr. Trump's lawyers over material he took with him would take place over the next year.
2022
Mid-January: After negotiating with Mr. Trump's lawyers throughout 2021, the National Archives recovered 15 boxes of materials that had been taken from the White House and stored at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump's private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla.
Sometime after receiving the boxes, the National Archives discovered what appeared to be classified information within the documents Mr. Trump had held on to and flagged the incident to the Justice Department for guidance.
Feb. 18: The archives publicly confirmed that it had found documents marked as containing "classified national security information" among the boxes it had received from Mr. Trump.
April 12: In an email reviewed by The New York Times, officials at the archives alerted two of Mr. Trump's archive representatives that the F.B.I. would start reviewing the original 15 boxes recovered in January. The request to look at the material was made through the Biden White House, "on behalf of the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.," according to the email.
May 6: The general counsel of the National Archives reached out to three lawyers who had worked with Mr. Trump to convey that the archives had determined that more than two dozen boxes of Mr. Trump's presidential records were missing and that it needed the lawyers' "immediate assistance" to retrieve them, according to an email obtained by The New York Times.
May 10: The acting U.S. archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, sent a letter to one of Mr. Trump's lawyers, Evan Corcoran, saying that Mr. Trump had taken more than 700 pages of classified documents, including some related to the nation's most covert intelligence operations, with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left office.
Early June: Jay Bratt, the Justice Department's top counterintelligence official, traveled with a small group of other federal officials to Mar-a-Lago. They met with a lawyer for Mr. Trump and examined a basement storage area where the former president had stowed material that had come with him from the White House. Mr. Bratt subsequently emailed the lawyer and told him to further secure the documents in the storage area with a stronger padlock.
Aug. 8: F.B.I. agents descended on Mar-a-Lago and searched the premises, eventually carrying away 26 boxes of documents and other items, including 11 sets of material marked as classified.
Aug. 22: Mr. Trump's lawyers filed a legal motion asking a federal judge in Florida to appoint an independent arbiter, known as a special master, to weed out any documents protected by executive privilege from the trove taken by the F.B.I.
Aug. 26, 2022, 9:38 a.m. ET
What is in a search warrant affidavit?
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The expected release of the affidavit that accompanied the Justice Department's application for a warrant to search former President Donald J. Trump's residence in Florida is exceedingly rare.
Such documents are generally not disclosed while a criminal investigation is continuing and before any charges have been brought, because they can provide a road map to the origins of the inquiry and tip off targets about what the government knows.
The search this month at Mr. Trump's Mar-a-Lago compound yielded government documents the former president took when he left office and was apparently refusing to give back. The magistrate judge who approved the search, Bruce Reinhart, has released the search warrant itself, along with several related documents, in response to a Justice Department request after Mr. Trump and his allies claimed there was no legitimate legal basis for the search.
But affidavits contain much more sensitive information than the warrant itself. The purpose of an affidavit is to lay out for a judge the evidence that the government contends amounts to probable cause — a legal threshold showing there is sufficient reason to believe that a search is likely to uncover evidence of a crime.
An early section of typical affidavits is an introduction. In a series of numbered paragraphs, F.B.I. agents describe their role in the bureau and their background, while summarizing the cases they are investigating. (When the Justice Department released the search warrant itself, it blacked out the name of agents involved in the search — although someone leaked an unredacted copy to the pro-Trump news outlet Breitbart, which published those names.)
A second section typically describes statutory authority and definitions. These paragraphs list and explain in the abstract one or more criminal statutes that are the basis for the investigation. The search warrant, which was already disclosed, listed three criminal statutes, so this section is likely to be duplicative of information that is already public — unless it turns out the F.B.I. had listed another potential crime that Judge Reinhart rejected.
A third section is the most sensitive. It lays out the facts supporting agents' belief that there is probable cause to believe the targets violated those criminal laws and that evidence of those crimes is likely to be found at the place they want to search.
These paragraphs are typically a narrative about what the government knows about the target's actions. They can include citations to what witnesses told the F.B.I., excerpts from intercepted emails or phone calls or data about such communications, and other evidence investigators would want to protect at this stage.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/26/us/trump-warrant-affidavit
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