The Justice Department is warning a federal magistrate judge that the safety of a “significant” number of witnesses would be endangered by forcing federal prosecutors to further reveal parts of an affidavit which led to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.
The warning came on Friday, in the form of a previously sealed memo explaining the redactions that DoJ officials made to the document. The judge in the case previously ordered the agency to prepare for public release the affidavit which led to his approval of a search warrant targeting Mar-a-Lago.
Justice Department officials are investigating whether the former president or his staff illegally retained classified documents, including some files with very high-level classifications, at his unsecured Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in violation of any one of numerous federal laws governing such practices. The investigation has reportedly been ongoing for months, and culiminated in the unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago earlier this months when the supposedly illegal materials were seized.
In the memo unsealed on Friday, prosecutors warn that “the materials marked for redaction must remain sealed to protect the safety and privacy of a signficant number of civilian witnesses”.
Publication of the memo comes on the heels of reports that Donald Trump and his inner circle suspect that some within their ranks may be informing the FBI on their actions, and the memo in particulaly suggests that there could be more than one informant amond the hundreds of staff, guests, and Trump allies seen in and around Mar-a-Lago over the past several months.
Republican allies of the former president have scrambled to defend Mr Trump in the wake of the raid, with many disparaging the actions of the FBI and the Justice Department, claiming that the agencies have been politicised. Some members of House GOP leadership have vowed investigations of the agencies upon their potential return to power next year, and minority whip Steve Scalise even bizarrely suggested on Fox News that the raid could have been the result of workings of “rogue” agents.
Few have addressed the central issue, which remains unexplained: Why did Mr Trump apparently have high-level documents in unsecured places around his Mar-a-Lago resort, in direct violation of federal laws which require any documents to be managed by the National Archives and, in the case of classified materials, only viewed in secure areas?
Republicans like John Bolton and Karl Rove, who have left their positions in government, have undermined any defences their Capitol Hill allies have attempted to make and said almost uniformly that the president likely broke the law.
"My sense is [the Archives and Justice Department] were asking for a year and a half, and why he was holding on to these materials when he had no legal authority to do so under the [Presidential Records Act] is beyond me,” Mr Rove said in a Fox News interview on Friday.
