Federal Judge Bruce E. Reinhart has ordered that the affidavit or statement that served to justify the search of Mar-a-Lago, the mansion of former President Donald Trump in Palm Beach (Florida), be published this Friday at noon, on March 8. August.
What is released, however, will be the non-confidential version, after the Department of Justice has eliminated everything that is considered to be kept secret.
The question is how much information will be left after those cross-outs.
The Department of Justice, under the attorney general, had already said that if the confidential parts were redacted, the document would be incomprehensible and meaningless, so it was against that too.
“The omissions necessary to mitigate damage to the integrity of the investigation would be so extensive as to render the remaining text without meaningful content,” he said in a brief filed in court.
The judge, however, has preferred that it be published.
Whether or not what remains is of public interest, relevant and significant is not up to him to say, he argued at the hearing held last Thursday in the South Florida court of which he is the owner.
The Department of Justice has delivered this Thursday the non-confidential version.
After receiving it, Judge Reinhart, who was the one who approved the search warrant, has decided that it be published this Friday, accepting the suggested cross-outs, considering that they are in line with the legitimate interest of the authorities in preserving the integrity of the ongoing investigation.
protected parts
“I believe that the Government has discharged its burden to show a compelling reason/good cause for concealing portions of the affidavit because disclosure would reveal the identities of witnesses, law enforcement officers, and non-charged parties, strategy, direction, the scope, sources and methods of the investigation, and the information of the grand jury protected” by procedural legislation, the Florida judge points out in the order that the document be published.
The risk, after eliminating all these aspects, is that effectively what is published is so irrelevant that it gives the impression that there was no compelling justification for the registry.
That risk, however, is outweighed by all the information already known about the confidential documents that Trump kept in his possession, apparently breaking the law.
And, despite the hidden parts, it can also still reveal matters of interest that help better understand the registry's decision.
The former president did ask for the affidavit to be published.
These kinds of attestations are not published when a case is still in progress.
The Department of Justice argued that its dissemination could compromise the investigation.
The concealment of part of the affidavit aims to avert that risk.
The Justice Department also feared that the release of the affidavit could chill future witness cooperation in this and other high-profile investigations.
Before the affidavit, both the Prosecutor's Office and Trump agreed that the search warrant be published with its annexes and the inventory of assets seized by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
This allowed us to know that Trump is being investigated for at least three possible crimes punishable by fines and/or long prison sentences and also that numerous documents classified as “top secret” were found in the registry.
In reality, it is not usual for the search warrant or the inventory of seized goods to be published either, but in this case nothing is usual.
Never before had a judge ordered the search of the house of a former president in search of evidence of possible crimes, so the request for transparency and public explanations have played in favor of the dissemination of these documents.
This Friday we will see to what extent that transparency reaches.
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