Then-President Donald Trump seen through a window in the White House.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
A federal judge said the redacted Mar-a-Lago search warrant would be released Friday.
Legal and national-security experts said the document could be damaging to Trump.
It could provide some important new details about the FBI’s case, they said.
A federal judge’s decision to order the release of an affidavit used in the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort likely spells more bad news for the former president, legal experts say.
Judge Bruce Reinhart on Thursday ordered the document, which will contain Justice Department redactions, to be released by midday ET on Friday.
The document, in its unredacted form, describes the evidence underpinning the warrant used in the August 8 search, but the DOJ successfully argued that making all of the evidence public could compromise its ongoing investigation.
The warrant itself revealed that agents believed that Trump may have breached the Espionage Act — which outlaws mishandling information sensitive to US national security — but does not detail why.
But even in a redacted form, the document will be damaging to Trump, legal experts say.
The former president has sought to portray the search as part of a plot by his political enemies based on scant evidence, but the document will likely indicate the strength of the evidence on which the FBI acted, they said.
“I can’t imagine that Trump is going to be happy with this document, given the fact it was an advocacy document written to persuade the judge to find probable cause to undertake a search,” John Dean, an attorney and the key witness in the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, told CNN Thursday.
“That isn’t a document that’s going to put a lot of pluses in for Donald Trump — in fact, the exact opposite. So I think he’s going to be very unhappy with what he finds and with what comes out and it will not be good for Donald Trump.”
Bradley Moss, a national-security attorney, echoed that view.
“Whatever comes out of this tomorrow, I don’t think Trump’s people realize how bad it could look for him. It won’t be pretty,” he tweeted.
Moss said that the documents could provide details about what occurred between February — after the National Archives and Records Administration discovered that there was classified information in a batch of documents Trump had returned to them — and August, when the search was conducted.
He also said that the “movement or relocation” of records from a Mar-a-Lago storage room, where they were being kept, could be indicated in the documents. The New York Times previously reported that agents were prompted to request their search warrant on Mar-a-Lago after growing concerned by footage showing people entering and leaving the storage room.
On PBS, the national-security attorney Mark Zaid cautioned that while the general public would likely be “very disappointed” by the document, experts would probably be able to glean interesting new insights into the probe, given the likely extensive nature of the redactions.
Trump has called for the full unredacted release of the affidavit and sought to portray attempts to hold back information from the public as attempts to conceal evidence of the plot against him. The former president has long portrayed himself as a the victim of plots by the so-called “deep state” of hostile officials and their Democratic allies.
But this strategy backfired this week after John Solomon, a Trump ally, released a May letter from the National Archivist to Trump’s attorneys that revealed the extent of classified information Trump took home with him.
Solomon said the letter contained evidence of a White House plot against Trump, while experts said it actually revealed the highly-classified nature of the information Trump had held at Mar-a-Lago and the urgent desire of the FBI to inspect it.
Zaid said that the more information was made public, the worse it would be for Trump.
“The more information that comes out, contrary to what the Trump team is saying and encouraging it to happen, is actually undermining their own legal arguments and public policy posture,” he said.
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.