A member of the US Secret Service at the entrance to Donald Trump’s home in Mar-A-Lago.
Former President Donald Trump said he supported the release of documents related to the FBI’s search of his home in Mar-a-Lago earlier this week, including a copy of the search warrant and a receipt of items agents found from the property. achieved.
Trump made the announcement late Thursday on his social media site, Truth Social, in response to a Justice Department request in a Florida court to unseal the documents.
“Not only will I not oppose the release of documents related to the un-American, unwarranted and unnecessary raid and break-in of my home in Palm Beach, Florida, Mar-a-Lago, I am going one step further through the immediate release of those documents,” Trump said in the post.
Trump’s decision to agree to release the search warrant — something he’s been able to do himself since the search took place Monday — sparks a public confrontation between the former president’s legal team and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The Justice Department has long had a policy of not speaking publicly about pending investigations, but Garland took the unusual step on Thursday to announce that he had “personally approved” the search, which Trump originally announced after giving it to the government. was going on.
Federal agents searched Trump’s Florida residence as part of an investigation into whether the former president was unlawfully holding onto presidential records that would go to the National Archives once he left office, including potentially classified material, according to people familiar with the case.
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that a category of documents the FBI was looking for related to nuclear weapons. It was not clear whether the weapons were American weapons or weapons that belonged to another country, or whether they were among the documents that agents seized.
Mishandling classified information can carry a range of federal felony charges, and information related to nuclear weapons and technology is uniquely sensitive. The Justice Department’s chief of counterintelligence and export control, Jay Bratt, signed the government’s request to unseal the warrant and reportedly visited Mar-a-Lago earlier this summer to review the documents in Trump’s possession.
In trying to share the search warrant documents with the public, DOJ officials explained that they no longer believed the typical reasons for keeping this information under seal — to ensure there was no interference with the search and to to keep an ongoing investigation secret. The DOJ attorneys noted that the search was now a thing of the past and that Trump and his supporters had published information about it.
“The clear and strong public interest in understanding what happened under these circumstances weighs heavily in favor of unsealing,” the Justice Department said in the dossier.
Deadline 24 hours
To conduct the Mar-a-Lago search, prosecutors had to apply to a federal magistrate for approval. The judge would have to determine that the government had provided sufficient information that there was a probable reason that the search would yield evidence related to criminal activity; it does not mean that the judge found evidence that a particular person had committed a crime.
The Department of Justice has specifically asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who is in West Palm Beach, Florida, to open a copy of the search warrant, which would contain information about the general scope of the search and possibly information about the search warrant. specific federal crimes. under investigation — and a receipt that FBI agents left with the items they retrieved from the property. A release of these documents would not include a copy of an affidavit that prosecutors would typically file with a more complete account of the potential criminal behavior in question.
Reinhart acted quickly and immediately ordered the DOJ to consult with Trump and his attorneys and notify the court within 24 hours whether Trump would oppose the request.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
