WASHINGTON — Newly unsealed details from the Justice Department’s investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information shed light on how investigators made their case in court last year for a warrant to search the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home, including the extent of surveillance footage they said showed boxes being moved.
The government on Wednesday released a new version of an affidavit that an FBI agent submitted in August 2022 asking a Florida federal magistrate judge to approve the warrant. Redacted copies of the affidavit were released after the search, but following Trump’s June indictment and a request by media outlets to unseal more information, the Justice Department agreed additional sections of the affidavit could be made public.
Trump is charged with illegally retaining national defense information and of trying to obstruct the government’s efforts to retrieve the classified documents. He has pleaded not guilty. His co-defendant and longtime personal aide Walt Nauta is also charged with obstruction.
The latest version of the affidavit includes more details on what the government knew a year ago about the layout of Mar-a-Lago, where boxes of government records that Trump had taken with him from the White House were being stored, and the movement of those boxes around the time Trump received a grand jury subpoena for classified material in his possession.
Certain sections of the affidavit remain sealed; the Justice Department has said in its court papers that those parts of the document need to remain blacked out to protect grand jury secrecy “and to protect investigative sources and methods.”
One of the newly released portions shows how the government relied on surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago to allege that Nauta moved dozens of boxes out of a storage room area in May and June 2022. Prosecutors have accused Trump and Nauta of conspiring to move boxes to avoid complying with the grand jury subpoena.
According to the affidavit, the FBI reviewed a hard drive with video footage from four cameras in the basement hallway of Mar-a-Lago. The footage began on April 23, 2022, and ended on June 24, 2022, according to the FBI. The cameras appear to have been motion-activated, as opposed to constantly recording.
One of the cameras, identified as “South Tunnel Liquor,” provided a view of the entrance and exit of an anteroom leading to a storage room where the government said Trump stored boxes of documents; however the doorway to the anteroom isn’t visible in the camera’s view, as a refrigerator blocks the view. The FBI agent noted the anteroom led to four doors; the storage room door is painted gold.
The affidavit then describes the movements of a person called “Witness 5.” The person isn’t named, but the events match sections of the indictment that identify Nauta.
According to the FBI, on May 24, 2022, “Witness 5” exited the anteroom doorway with three boxes. Then, on May 30, 2022, four days after the FBI interviewed Witness 5 — including “significant” questioning about the location of boxes — Witness 5 left the anteroom doorway with about 50 bankers boxes. Agents didn’t observe the same quantity of boxes being returned to the storage room through the anteroom in the footage, they said.
On June 1, 2022, Witness 5 was observed carrying 11 brown cardboard boxes out of the anteroom entrance. One didn’t have a lid “and appeared to contain papers,” the FBI said. The next day, on June 2, 2022, Witness 5 was observed on video moving 25 to 30 boxes into the anteroom area. About 3 1/2 hours later, Witness 5 was observed escorting a Trump attorney through the anteroom’s entrance; the lawyer left about 2 1/2 hours later.
The Trump attorney isn’t named in the affidavit, but the description matches other public court filings that identity Evan Corcoran. Corcoran hasn’t been charged; prosecutors allege Trump tried to stymie his lawyer’s effort to comply with the grand jury subpoena.
The latest affidavit indicates the FBI told the judge in applying for the warrant that it had established that classified material was being kept in other areas of Mar-a-Lago besides the basement storage room, but that it was “very likely” that Trump’s attorney hadn’t searched other locations.
In addition to approving the release of the new version of the affidavit, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Wednesday also directed the disclosure of a June order related to a government motion to unseal information in order to share it with Trump’s defense team in his criminal case. The Justice Department opposed releasing that to the public; Reinhart gave the government until July 13 to appeal.
The media outlets that petitioned Reinhart following Trump’s indictment — a group that includes Bloomberg News — had also asked the judge to release the government’s motion related to sharing sealed evidence with Trump. Reinhart agreed with the Justice Department to keep that secret since it “identifies investigative steps that have not yet been made public.”
