The Search Affidavidit
Terry H. Schwadron
Aug. 27, 2022
If you didn’t trust that the Justice Department and the FBI had reason to serve search warrants on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home to recover illegal removed and held classified documents, yesterday’s release of the redacted search warrant affidavit might not persuade you
As expected, a lot of the redacted report is blacked out — the parts that recount the specific who and what information that triggered the arrival of FBI agents earlier this month.
If you think, on the other hand, that Trump’s been blowing smoke about having and holding information, there was plenty in what was released to share Justice’s concern that actual people and sources to highly classified documents were believed to be at risk.
And, from various Trump handwritten markings in the margins of documents already retrieved in January, you can believe that he knew that the documents were sensitive.
Trump apparently just didn’t care about that, and insisted through his lawyers, whose own letter to prosecutors also was released, that Trump thought the documents were his to do with as he wanted and didn’t belong to you and me.
The law says he is wrong.
What you can learn from reading even the redacted affidavit is that the National Archives have been at this document retrieval project over two years with lots of Trump resistance and delay that the number of documents has been substantial, and that the law doesn’t care about the motives of the former president, just his removal and holding of goods in violation of some serious statutes. The law also doesn’t care if The Former Guy waved a magic wand to automatically declassify anything he chose, just possession of information that may be harmful to the country’s national security.
In sum, even in redacted form: It wasn’t an unanticipated FBI raid, it wasn’t political prosecution, it stemmed from belief that the nation’s secrets were open to exposure — something more important that self-delusional egotism about what Trump insists was “mine.”
What you can’t learn here is that process matters, despite our impatience. So does truth.
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