Trump Search Said to Be Part of Effort to Find Highly Classified Material
The former president said he will not object to the Justice Department’s move to release the search warrant used to carry out the search of his Florida home.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland
moved on Thursday to make public the legal authorization for the F.B.I.’s search of former President Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida, which was carried out as part of the government’s effort to account for documents that one person briefed on the matter said related to some of the most highly classified programs run by the United States.
Mr. Garland said he had personally approved the search after the failure of “less intrusive” attempts to retrieve material taken from the White House by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Garland provided no details. But the person briefed on the matter said investigators had been concerned about material from what the government calls
“special access programs,” a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities.
Government officials have expressed concern that allowing highly classified materials to remain at Mr. Trump’s home could leave them vulnerable to efforts by foreign adversaries to acquire them, according to another person familiar with the Justice Department’s thinking.
Late on Thursday night, Mr. Trump said he would not oppose the motion to release the warrant and the inventory.
He wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that he was “encouraging” their release. “Release the documents now!” he said.
In a clipped, two-minute statement to reporters at the Justice Department’s headquarters, Mr. Garland said he decided to break his silence and make a public statement because Mr. Trump had disclosed the action himself. The attorney general also cited the “surrounding circumstances” of the case and the “substantial public interest in this matter.”
But Mr. Garland also used the brief appearance to defend, at least implicitly, the Justice Department’s handling of the case against the torrent of criticism directed at it by Mr. Trump and his allies.
“Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor,” Mr. Garland said. “Under my watch that is precisely what the Justice Department is doing.”
Minutes before Mr. Garland took the podium, a top official in the Justice Department’s national security division filed a motion to unseal the search warrant and an inventory of items retrieved in the search on Monday.
While the inventory provided to Mr. Trump’s team after the search is unlikely to reveal details about the specific documents he kept, it refers to an array of sensitive material, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Judge Bruce Reinhart, the federal magistrate in the Southern District of Florida who approved the search warrant and is handling the motion to unseal it, had issued an order requiring the Justice Department to serve a copy of its motion to Mr. Trump’s lawyers. It said the department would have to tell the judge by 3 p.m. on Friday whether Mr. Trump opposed the motion.
Mr. Garland’s statement
amounted to a challenge to Mr. Trump, who has been free to release the search warrant and the list of items taken during the search on his own, but has declined to do so. Many Trump allies and Republicans have also called on Mr. Garland to explain his decision, adding political complexity — or hypocrisy — to any decision by Mr. Trump to oppose making the search warrant public.
The Justice Department did not seek to release the affidavits — which contain much more information about the behavior of Mr. Trump and evidence presented by others — that were used to obtain the warrant.
The public statement by Mr. Garland came at an extraordinary moment, as a sprawling set of investigations into the former president on multiple fronts gained momentum even as Mr. Trump continued to signal that he might soon announce another run for the White House.
Mr. Trump
invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on Wednesday in a civil investigation into his business practices by the New York attorney general, and a close ally in the House
had his phone seized by federal agents this week in one strand of the investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power despite his election loss in 2020.
Mr. Garland also spoke on the same day that law enforcement officers
shot and killed a man who they said tried to break into the F.B.I.’s Cincinnati office on Thursday. Investigators were looking into whether he had ties to extremist groups, including one that participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol,
according to two law enforcement officials familiar with the matter.
The
search on Monday of Mr. Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, his private club, was the most explosive development yet in the various inquiries. The investigation centers on whether he improperly took sensitive materials with him from the White House when his term ended and then failed to return all of them — including classified documents — when the National Archives and the Justice Department demanded that he do so.
Months before the F.B.I. arrived at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump had received a subpoena this spring in search of documents that federal investigators believed he had failed to turn over earlier in the year, when he returned 15 boxes of material to the archives, three people familiar with the matter said.
The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search, and suggests that the Justice Department tried methods short of a search warrant to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of sending F.B.I. agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago.
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