Last week, federal magistrate William Reinhardt ordered the DoJ and FBI to produce and release a redacted version of the underlying affidavit used to secure the warrant to search the residence of former President Donald Trump. You can read the warrant below.
The supporting affidavit for warrants supply information that the magistrate or judge needs to determine if the warrant is supportable. As a rule, those affidavits are kept under seal, however in this case the magistrate determined that there was a compelling public interest for a release. The magistrate issued an order to release the affidavit with suitably redacted. In typical FBI fashion, their internal phone directory is classified after all, the majority of the document is redacted. You can find the complete affidavit here, as I couldn’t find it on scribd or any place else that I could embed from.
The first few pages cover the statutory information of the laws involved. From there it covers the offences and finally any supporting evidence of potential crimes. The redactions start at the top and are liberally sprinkled through the first sections of the affidavit, and these are mostly understandable as they are names of FBI agents and others. Once the document gets to the supporting evidence, it turns into a blob of black.
There are several pages that are nothing but heading numbers and redactions. Even the section that lays out the probable cause is redacted.
Now, on to my thoughts. As a former holder of a TS/SCI clearance, a couple of things stand out to me. First, and really the most important, POTUS IS the classification authority. If he decides that something is either classified or not, that is that. Anything else is window dressing. I realize that Trump is now a former President, but any declassifications he made while in office are still valid. Second, and I know some of you may disagree, if there were NDI (national defense Intelligence) marked documents in his possession, declassified or not, they shouldn’t have been in some storage room at Mar-A-Lago with a single lock on the door. There were multiple reports of Trump being somewhat cavalier with classified documents while in office. I can see no reason why that would have changed. Third, and finally, this smacks of a political hit job. The Courts have ruled many times that the fPOTUS’s decisions on what constitute personal records are not up for judicial review, the Presidential Records act not withstanding. Why the acting director of the National Archives believed that she could or should press this issue is beyond me.
In closing I’ll leave you with a quote from Richard Nixon. “Well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal “