Listen to this articleDonald Trump, Former President of the United States of America to be indicted. Evidence against him is alarming.
A recently released FBI affidavit concerning the Mar-a-Lago search means trouble for Trump.
A national security lawyer predicted that “Donald Trump will be indicted in the classified documents matter.”
The affidavit also calls Trump’s claim of innocence into question because “it was all declassified.”
A federal magistrate judge unsealed a redacted version of an FBI affidavit on Friday, which legal experts said was a damning blow to former President Donald Trump as he is being investigated for his handling of sensitive records.
Significant portions of the document were blacked out.
This was done to protect witnesses, sources and methods, grand jury details, and the overall size and scope of the department’s investigation.
Nonetheless, the affidavit contained significant information about why investigators took the extraordinary step of carrying out a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.
It also exposed the extent to which officials attempted less invasive methods to get Trump to turn up official documents that were wrongfully kept at his Florida home.
“There was certainly probable cause to believe that the former president retained classified documents.”
Documents which were clearly in violation of the applicable statute in a location that was not secure in accordance with the regulations, said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor from the Southern District of New York.
The decision by a Florida federal judge to release a redacted version of the affidavit used in the Mar-a-lago search is a major development in the case against former Pres. Trump, and could provide key details on what led to the historic search. pic.twitter.com/uytH0i9CKu
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) August 25, 2022
He said, “This hurts him more than this helps him.”
After reading the affidavit, Norm Eisen, the ethics adviser to former President Barack Obama, stated that “even redacted it is incredibly damning.”
He stated that “people are probably going to jail for this behaviour.”
Some national security experts went one step further, criticizing the 45th president openly and raising the possibility of the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president.
National security attorney Bradley Moss, a well-known figure in Washington, DC, posted on Twitter, “I have seen enough, folks,” “Donald Trump will face charges related to the secret materials.”
After the FBI descended in Mar-a-Lago earlier this month it was Fury Road among elected Republicans. Today, when we saw some (not all) of the justification, it was crickets. Could it be that the GOP really is tiring of the Trump show? https://t.co/vP3dK04y2g
— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) August 26, 2022
The affidavit contains the following important information:
- The 15 boxes of records that Trump turned over to the National Archives in January were found to contain “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, random printouts, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records, and a lot of classified records,'” according to the National Archives review.
- According to NARA, “highly classified records were unfolded, combined with other records, and otherwise improperly [sic] identified” was their “most critical concern.”
- There were 184 documents in the boxes, of which 67 were classified as confidential, 92 as top-secret, and 25 as top-secret.
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The affidavit stated that “a number of the documents included what appears to be [Trump’s] handwritten notes.”
Notably, the Justice Department revealed in a brief accompanying the affidavit that it is keeping portions of the records related to the Mar-a-Lago search sealed in order to protect a “significant number of civilian witnesses.”
Former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Barbara McQuade told Insider that the language suggests that “people inside Trump’s former administration or at Mar-a-Lago are providing information to the FBI.”
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Source- The New York Times & CBS Evening News
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