A federal magistrate judge on Wednesday unsealed additional portions of the affidavit used by the FBI last summer to obtain a search warrant for sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago, the private club. and former President Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida, revealing some. new details about how this amazing process took place.
The new unredacted sections of the affidavit suggest prosecutors based their search, in part, on surveillance footage from cameras near a storage room in the basement of Mar-a-Lago that showed Walt Nauta , a personal assistant of Mr. Trump, which mobilized dozens. in boxes in and out of the room days before federal prosecutors arrived to collect any sensitive records Mr. Trump.
Much of the affidavit material that was unsealed Wednesday has already been made public in Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta was issued in Miami last month. The indictment accuses the former president of 31 counts of illegally retaining national defense information and a separate count of conspiring with Mr. Nauta to block the government’s efforts to recover them.
The judge who ordered the unsealing, Bruce E. Reinhart, issued two previous orders unsealing portions of the warrant affidavit in response to media requests.
The newly revealed information includes a photo of dozens of boxes in the Mar-a-Lago storage room, as well as a detailed description of various angles captured by security cameras outside the room.
“The storage room door was painted gold and had no other markings on it,” the FBI agent who drafted the affidavit wrote. “The door to the storage room is located almost halfway up the wall and is reached by several wooden steps.”
Echoing the indictment, the unredacted affidavit also noted that between May 24 and June 1, 2022, Mr. Nauta removed 64 boxes from the Mar-a-Lago storage room but returned only 25 or 30 of them.
“The current location of the boxes that were removed from the storage room but not returned to it is unknown,” the affidavit said.
The newly released version of the affidavit does not, however, reveal all the reasons federal prosecutors believe the sensitive records remained at Mar-a-Lago even after two previous attempts to retrieve them from by Mr. Trump.
In January 2022, Mr. Trump shipped 15 boxes of government records from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives, which discovered they contained nearly 200 classified documents. That prompted federal prosecutors to issue a subpoena in May for any additional materials with classified marks still held by Mr. Trump. In June 2022, after conducting a diligent search of Mar-a-Lago, one of the former president’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, gave the government another batch of 38 classified documents.
But even though the two initial groups of documents were returned, prosecutors suspect that Mr. Trump has even more classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago residence and the surrounding area. The surveillance footage of Mr. Nauta is apparently the only piece of evidence that supports that belief. A lengthy section of the affidavit that follows prosecutors’ assertion that Mr. Trump did not turn over everything he needed to remain undercover.
Judge Reinhart was the one who issued the Mar-a-Lago search warrant in August, which resulted in federal agents seizing more than 100 classified documents.
Judge Reinhart was also assigned as the magistrate judge in the prosecution of Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta. Mr. Nauta is scheduled to be arraigned in the Federal District Court in Miami on Thursday.
Among the new details revealed on Wednesday is that Mr. Corcoran or the other lawyer of Mr. Trump did not tell prosecutors that the former president declassified any of the 38 classified documents handed over in June. That omission seemed to contradict an earlier statement made by government lawyers, who claimed that as president, Mr. Trump has “absolute authority” to declassify any material he wants.
Recent unredacted portions of the affidavit also said Mr. Corcoran told the government that he was informed that there were no classified records “in any private office space or in other areas of Mar-a-Lago” – a statement that the search of the property revealed to be false.
In March, a federal judge in Washington forced Mr. Corcoran to provide records and testify to a grand jury investigating the case, working around the usual protections of attorney-client privilege because he believes Mr. Trump misled Mr. Corcoran where sensitive records are kept at Mar-a-Lago.
