Donald Trump Hid Classified Government Documents, New Unsealed Mar-a-Lago Affidavit Implies

A federal judge in Florida has agreed to a request of the Justice Department to unseal a slightly less redacted version of the affidavit used to gain a warrant to search former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home.

The less redacted version of the previously released affidavit, which was unsealed Tuesday, revealed some unknown details about the classified materials that Trump gave to the Justice Department under subpoena in June.

Previous court filings showed that Trump voluntarily returned 15 boxes of materials to the National Archives in January, which resulted in a referral to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The August 8 raid at Mar-a-Lago resulted from law enforcement suspicion that additional documents remained inside the property despite Trump's camp assuring that a "diligent search" had accounted for all of the material.

Florida Judge Unseals New Part of Redacted Mar-a-Lago Affidavit

According to CNN, the now-lifted redactions in the search warrant affidavit shed new details on the grand jury subpoena that federal investigators used to get surveillance tapes from Donald Trump's company.

The prosecutors used the surveillance footage while probing the potential mishandling of classified files at the Mar-a-Lago mansion. Based on the unredacted filing, the DOJ directed the Trump Organization to turn over "any and all surveillance records videos images, photographs, and/or CCTV from internal cameras located on ground floor" or basement between January 10 and June 24.

The said date was around the time when Trump's team returned the first set of documents to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The 15 boxes that the former president's team shipped back to NARA reportedly contained highly sensitive documents, other personal documents, and magazines.

The unusual shipment has sparked concern in the national agency, prompting a back-and-forth correspondence from Trump and the National Archives.

The Hill said it remains unclear if the former president has complied with the request for the video footage, but a part of the affidavit showed that his staff turned over a hard drive last July 6.

What Do the Mar-a-Lago Records Contain?

CNN reported that there had been three instances where documents from Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home were made available to the government, either forcibly or voluntarily.

The first one was the January shipment to the National Archives. The 15 boxes shipped out reportedly contained over 700 pages of government records. A total of 184 classified documents were found, which comprised 67 confidential ones, 92 secret documents, and 25 top-secret markings.

In the May subpoena, which the less redacted version revealed, Trump only gave one envelope containing the last classified records in Mar-a-Lago.

The envelope contained 38 classified documents: 5 were marked confidential, 16 were secret, and 17 were top-secret. On the controversial August 8 raid, 33 boxes more were retrieved containing 103 classified documents.

Did Donald Trump Hide the Documents?

In an NPR report, authorities found that the August 8 boxes recovered from Mar-a-Lago contained personal correspondences of Donald Trump mixed with top-secret documents.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC that the new information revealed in the less-redacted version of the affidavit implicates that Trump "did play a role" in the cover-up for the remaining documents that were still in Mar-a-Lago after the May subpoena.

"There's this implication that documents were stored in storage areas and that there was nothing in personal offices and that seems like the sort of information that would have been very likely to come from the former president," she said in the interview.

Vance further noted that this gave the Justice Department more basis to move forward with the investigation and inquiries to witnesses without violating a judge's order to halt the probe. Last week, the DOJ suggested that there could be more classified records removed from the Trump White House that investigators have not yet located.

A detailed list of items seized from Mar-a-Lago property showed the FBI located 48 empty folders labeled as classified and another 42, which implied that they should be returned to a staff secretary or military aide. Legal experts were baffled as to why these folders were empty, and it was unclear whether records were missing.

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Ivan Korrs

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