WASHINGTON (AP) – The Justice Department on Monday rejected efforts to make public the affidavit supporting the search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, saying the investigation “involves highly classified material” and that the document contains sensitive witness information.
Government opposition responded to court filings by several news organizations, including the Associated Press, seeking to discredit the underlying affidavit that the Justice Department filed when it sought the warrant to search Mar- Trump’s a-Lago earlier this month.
Trump, in a Truth Social post early Tuesday, called for the release of the unredacted affidavit in the interest of transparency.
The court filing — by Juan Antonio Gonzalez, the U.S. attorney in Miami, and Jay Bratt, a senior Department of Justice national security official — argues that making the affidavit public “would cause significant and irreparable harm to this investigation criminal in progress”.
The document, prosecutors say, details “highly sensitive information about witnesses,” including people who have been interviewed by the government, and contains confidential grand jury information.
The government told a federal magistrate that prosecutors believe some additional records, including the warrant cover and the government’s request to seal the documents, should now be made public.
An unsealed property receipt Friday showed the FBI seized 11 sets of classified documents, with some not only marked top secret but also “sensitive compartmentalized information,” a special category meant to protect the top secrets of the nation that if revealed publicly could cause “exceptionally serious”. ” damage to US interests. Court records did not provide specific details about what information the documents might contain.
The Justice Department acknowledged Monday that its ongoing criminal investigation “involves highly classified material.”
The search warrant, also unsealed Friday, said federal agents were investigating possible violations of three different federal laws, including one governing the collection, transmission or loss of defense information under the ‘Espionage. The remaining statutes address the concealment, mutilation, or removal of records and the destruction, alteration, or falsification of documents in federal investigations.
The Mar-a-Lago search warrant, filed last Monday, was part of an ongoing Justice Department investigation into the discovery of classified White House records recovered from Trump’s home earlier this year. The National Archives had asked the department to investigate after it said 15 boxes of records it recovered from the estate contained classified records.
It remains unclear whether the Justice Department moved forward with the warrant only as a means to retrieve the records or as part of a broader criminal investigation or attempt to prosecute the former president. Various federal laws govern the handling of classified information, with criminal and civil penalties, as well as presidential records.
But the Justice Department, in its filing Monday, argued that its investigation is active and ongoing and that the release of additional information could not only compromise the investigation, but could also subject witnesses to threats or deterrence. others to come forward to cooperate with prosecutors.
“If released, the affidavit will serve as a road map for the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a way that is highly likely to compromise future steps by ‘investigation,'” the government wrote in the court filing.