The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mar-a-lago
and other laws by willfully retaining national security records that he was required to turn over to the National Archives.
The search, the affidavit reveals, was prompted by an intensive FBI review of an initial 15 boxes of materials 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 Trump chose to retain it.
Those concerns, and the continued unwillingness of 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 Garland to sign off on the highly unusual request for a search.
On Friday morning, before the documents were released, 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 FBI “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 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 Trump’s attorneys, which came after the grand jury had been formed.
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.
Trump went through at least some of the boxes in late 2021, although it is unclear if he went through them all.
His lead attorneys 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, Evan Corcoran, one of Trump’s attorneys, 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 Corcoran and Christina Bobb, another of Trump’s attorneys, had led 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 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.