Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart has announced that a redacted version of the affidavit that FBI agents used to obtain a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago will be made public by the Department of Justice (DOJ) by noon Friday.
In a two-page order, Reinhart said that he had accepted a redacted version of the document, which the government filed under seal on Thursday morning in the run-up to a Friday noon deadline.
“The government has met its burden of showing that its proposed redactions are narrowly tailored to serve the government’s legitimate interest in the integrity of the ongoing investigation and are the least onerous alternative to sealing the entire affidavit,” the order reads.
This followed Reinhart warning earlier this week that the extent of the government’s approved redactions related to the affidavit could render the document “meaningless.”
The federal judge singled out “the intense public and historical interest in an unprecedented search of a former President’s residence” as grounds for releasing a redacted version of the affidavit.
The remarks came after the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, Jay Bratt, argued that the document should be kept sealed due to the “volatile situation with respect to this search across the political spectrum — but on one side in particular.”
Mar-a-Lago Raid
On August 8, FBI agents raided Trump’s residence at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, reportedly seizing at least 27 boxes of documents as part of a DOJ criminal investigation into the removal of presidential records from the White House when the 45th president left office in January 2021. The boxes contained 17 sets of classified documents that were labeled top secret, secret, or confidential, according to an inventory list made public by Reinhart on August 12.
The warrant, unsealed on the same day, authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed.” By law, presidential records must be given to the National Archives and Records Administration when a president leaves office.
A few days after the August 8 developments, Trump demanded an “immediate release” of a search warrant for FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago home, which he slammed as “un-American, unwarranted, and unnecessary.”
Commenting on the raid on his Truth Social media platform, the ex-US president revealed that FBI agents even “broke” into his safe, and that “nothing like this has ever happened to a president of the United States before.”
“After working and cooperating with the relevant government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Trump pointed out, dubbing the FBI’s actions “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for president in 2024.”
While the White House denied prior knowledge of the raid and was tight-lipped on the matter, Republicans, including GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, pledged to get revenge on the FBI if they take back Congress in November in response to the “rogue behavior” of the agency.