WASHINGTON — A federal judge was set to decide immediately Friday whether to grant a Justice Department request to unseal the warrant that authorized the FBI to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate. Attorney General Merrick Garland said there was “significant public interest in this matter,” and Trump supported an “immediate” release of the order.
The decision on whether to unseal the records rested with U.S. Magistrate Bruce Rinehart, the same judge who signed the search warrant. The Justice Department had until Friday afternoon to tell the judge whether or not Trump’s lawyers agreed with the proposal to make it public.
In messages posted on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote: “Not only will I not oppose the release of documents … I am going one step further by ENCOURAGING the immediate release of these documents.” He continued to attack the search of Mar-a -Lago by the FBI as “un-American, unwarranted and unnecessary.”
Trump himself obtained at least some of the tapes the government wanted unsealed, but he and his lawyers have so far refused to make them public.
The Justice Department’s request is striking because such documents traditionally remain sealed during a pending investigation. But the department appears to recognize that its silence since the search has created a vacuum for bitter verbal attacks from Trump and his allies, and that the public has a right to speak to the FBI’s side about what prompted Monday’s raid on the former president’s home .
“The public’s clear and compelling interest in knowing what occurred under these circumstances weighs in favor of unsealing,” the motion, filed in federal court in Florida on Thursday, said.
If issued, the warrant could reveal damaging information about Trump and the FBI’s investigation into his handling of sensitive government documents just as he prepares for another bid for the White House. During his successful 2016 campaign, he frequently pointed to an FBI investigation into his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, into whether she improperly used classified information.
It’s unclear at this point how much information would be included in the documents if they were released, or whether they would include an FBI affidavit that would likely lay out a detailed factual basis for the search. The department specifically requested a printout of the warrant, as well as a receipt of ownership listing the items seized, along with two unspecified attachments.
Several news organizations have separately petitioned Reinhart to release all documents related to the search, given the high level of public interest.
To obtain a search warrant, federal authorities must prove to a judge that there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed. Garland said he personally approved the warrant, a decision he said the department did not take lightly, given that standard practice whenever possible is to opt for less intrusive tactics than searching the home.
In that 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 several months ago by FBI and Justice Department officials to assess how the documents were stored. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Neither Trump nor the FBI has said anything about what documents the FBI may have recovered or what exactly the agents were looking for.
Trump, who has for years criticized the FBI and sought to sow distrust among his supporters in its decisions, said the warrant was served and the search carried out despite his cooperation with the Justice Department during the search.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said his “lawyers and representatives were fully cooperative” before the search and that government officials “could have had whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, if we had it.”
FBI and DOJ policy cautions against discussing ongoing investigations, both to protect the integrity of the investigations and to avoid unfairly slandering someone who is under investigation but ultimately not charged. This is especially true in the case of search warrants, where supporting court documents are routinely kept secret while the investigation is ongoing.
In this case, however, Garland cited the fact that Trump himself provided the first public confirmation of the FBI search, “as is his right.” The Justice Department, in its new filing, also said that disclosing information about it now would not harm the court’s functions.
The Justice Department under Garland has been suspicious of public announcements of politically charged investigations or confirmation of the extent to which it may investigate Trump as part of a broader investigation into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 elections
The department has sought 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 recommend criminal charges against Clinton over of her handling of the emails — and when he spoke again just over a week before the election to tell Congress that the probe was effectively being renewed because of the discovery of new emails.
The Mar-a-Lago search warrant, issued Monday, was part of an ongoing Justice Department investigation into the discovery of classified White House records found at Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, home earlier this year. The National Archives has asked the department to investigate after it said 15 boxes of documents it recovered from the estate contained classified records. Numerous federal laws govern the handling of classified information.
The attorney general also condemned the verbal attacks on FBI and Justice Department personnel during the search. Some Republican allies of Trump have called for the FBI to be defunded. A large number of Trump supporters called for the order to be issued, hoping it would show that Trump had been unfairly attacked.
“I will not stand by when their integrity is unfairly attacked,” Garland said of federal law enforcement officers, calling them “dedicated, patriotic public servants.”
Earlier Thursday, a gunman wearing body armor tried to breach a security screening area at an FBI field office in Ohio, then fled and was later killed after a standoff with law enforcement. A law enforcement official briefed on the matter identified the man as Ricky Schiffer and said he was believed to have been in Washington in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol and may have been there the day it happened.
Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Lindsay Whitehurst and Meg Kinnard contributed to this report.
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