Federal agents were investigating potential violations of three different federal laws, including the Espionage Act, according to the warrant.
The FBI recovered documents that were labelled “top secret” from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to court papers released on Friday after a federal judge unsealed the warrant that authorised the unprecedented search this week.
The warrant says federal agents were investigating potential violations of three different federal laws, including one that governs gathering, transmitting or losing defence information under the Espionage Act. The other statutes address the concealment, mutilation or removal of records and the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations.
Trump kept possession of the documents despite multiple requests from agencies, including the National Archives, to turn over presidential records in accordance with federal law. The Justice Department’s request was striking because such warrants traditionally remain sealed during a pending investigation. But the department appeared to recognise that its silence since the search had created a vacuum for bitter verbal attacks by Trump and his allies, and felt that the public was entitled to the FBI’s side about what prompted Monday’s action at the former president’s home.
In this case, according to a person familiar with the matter, there was substantial engagement with Trump and his representatives prior to the search warrant, including a subpoena for records and a visit to Mar-a-Lago a couple of months ago by FBI and Justice Department officials to assess how the documents were stored. The person was not authorised to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The department has tried to avoid being seen as injecting itself into presidential politics, as happened in 2016 when then-FBI director James Comey made an unusual public statement announcing that the FBI would not be recommending criminal charges against Clinton regarding her handling of email — and when he spoke up again just over a week before the election to notify Congress that the probe was being effectively reopened because of the discovery of new emails.
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