The Justice Department pursued a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago because investigators suspected that former president Trump and his associates relocated and hid highly classified records, despite claiming that they returned such privileged information to the government, a Tuesday court filing from the department reveals.
The filing came amid Trump’s petition for a special master to conduct an independent review of materials seized from his residence, a motion which a judge said that she has “preliminary intent” to grant but which the DOJ opposes, citing potential injury to national security interests.
Taking inventory of the confiscated materials, the filing said that over 100 documents in 13 boxes or containers with classification markings were taken from the property. Three classified documents were seized from the desks in Trump’s office, it noted. A federal judge’s list of seized property included roughly 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note, the executive grant of clemency for Roger Stone, as well as information about French president Emmanuel Macron.
After the raid of his Florida home, Trump insisted he had been “cooperating fully” with authorities for months to return missing presidential records, making the surprise search unwarranted.
While the filing clarifies in more detail the turning point in the investigation into Trump’s retention of government documents, most of what was written in it was already revealed in the affidavit detailing the probable cause for the search of Mar-a-Lago, which a federal magistrate judge unsealed last week. The affidavit was released with many parts redacted. Some legal scholars, such as Jonathan Turley, attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School, suspect that the full filing simply details what was omitted in the affidavit.
However, the filing contained a picture of at least five yellow folders recovered from Mar-a-Lago marked “Top Secret” and another red one labeled “Secret.”
The search warrant outlined three possible criminal charges against the former president, including an alleged violation of the Presidential Records Act, misuse of classified information, and obstruction of justice.
Prosecutors are apparently trying to build a criminal case against Trump after finding evidence that “government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago,” the filing hinted and the New York Times reported.
“Efforts were likely undertaken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the filing added.
On May 11, DOJ attorneys obtained a subpoena to collect all materials designated as classified that were not yet returned by Trump, a request with which his team said they complied. A Trump lawyer, believed to be Christina Bobb, wrote a statement promising that everything to which the subpoena applied was returned after a “diligent search.” However, the DOJ then claimed it uncovered evidence that this was not true and outstanding documents remained.
The FBI “uncovered multiple sources of evidence indicating that the response to the May 11 grand jury subpoena was incomplete and that classified documents remained at the premises, notwithstanding the sworn certification made to the government on June 3,” the filing said. “In particular, the government developed evidence that a search limited to the storage room would not have uncovered all the classified documents at the premises.”
During the raid, the FBI, “in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former president’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform,” the filing said. Perhaps the extent of the Trump team’s cooperation had been exaggerated, the filing suggested.
However, Turley is skeptical of the DOJ’s claims of “obstructive conduct,” by which Trump allegedly moved or concealed classified documents, giving the department no choice but to search areas beyond the Mar-a-Lago storage room. The DOJ did not say in its filing, for instance, whether it could prove whether Trump’s team meant to obscure documents from the department’s scrutiny or whether it got mixed up about their whereabouts by mistake.
“It is not clear from the filing if the FBI has evidence of intentional acts of concealment as opposed to negligence in keeping track of such material,” Turley wrote.