A new super PAC supporting former President Donald J. Trump — and backed by a member of his private club, Mar-a-Lago — has emerged with plans to air ads during the general presidential election.

The group, Right for America, is backed by Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire former CEO of Marvel Entertainment, and will be led by a Trump ally, Sergio Gor, according to two people briefed on the matter.

It is unclear how much money the group plans to raise and when exactly ads will air. Its existence was first reported by Axios.

Mr Gor declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Perlmutter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump has blessed the committee in private conversations, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Two other board members are also close associates of Mr. Trump: Lee Rizzuto and Anthony Lomangino.

Wealthy donors often want some degree of control over how their money is spent since the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC paved the way for super PACs. But the pro-Trump group’s existence has already caused friction within Mr. S. Trump’s broader orbit. The main super PAC backing him, Make America Great Again Inc., has been aggressive for months, including attacking Trump’s rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, last year.

The potential for competing super PACs could raise issues regarding conflicting messages. And Mr. Trump could face questions about his proximity to the people who run it, since Mr. Perlmutter is a member of Mar-a-Lago, where the former president stays and often dines in the evenings in the presence of members. Legally, super PACs and campaigns cannot coordinate strategy.

The group has not yet announced who will make up its staff. But Mr. Trump has told allies that Mr. Perlmutter’s Hollywood associates will be involved in making the commercials.

Mr. Gor has a close relationship with Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.. Together they run a publishing company that printed Mr. Trump’s two books after his presidency.

Mr. Perlmutter has a long history with Mr. Trump and has often been involved in the former president’s work. Mr. Perlmutter and two other club members had a hand in shaping policy at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs while Mr. Trump was president.

A federal magistrate judge on Wednesday unsealed additional portions of the affidavit the FBI used last summer to obtain a search warrant for sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida private club and residence of former President Donald J. Trump. new details about how that extraordinary process had unfolded.

The recently unredacted portions of the affidavit suggested prosecutors based their search in part on surveillance footage from cameras near a basement storage unit at Mar-a-Lago, which showed Walt Nauta, a personal assistant to the Mr. Trump, who days dozens of boxes in and out of the room before federal prosecutors arrived to collect sensitive data still in Mr. Trump’s possession.

Much of the material in the affidavit unsealed Wednesday had already been made public in the comprehensive indictment against Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta issued last month in Miami. That indictment charged the former president with 31 counts of illegally withholding national defense information and a separate case of conspiring with Mr. Nauta to hinder the government’s efforts to recover them.

The judge who ordered the unsealing, Bruce E. Reinhart, had issued two prior orders to unseal individual portions of the affidavit in response to media requests.

The newly revealed information included a photo of dozens of boxes in the Mar-a-Lago storage area, as well as a detailed description of the various angles captured by the security cameras outside the room.

“The door to the storage room was painted gold and had no other markings,” the FBI agent who drafted the affidavit wrote. “The door to the storage room is about halfway up the wall and is reached by a number of wooden steps.”

Pursuing the indictment, the unredacted affidavit also noted that between May 24 and June 1, 2022, Mr. Nauta removed 64 boxes from storage space at Mar-a-Lago, but only put 25 or 30 back.

“The current location of the boxes that were removed from the storage area but not returned to it is unknown,” the affidavit said.

However, the recently released version of the affidavit did not reveal all the reasons federal prosecutors believed sensitive data was left in Mar-a-Lago, even after two previous attempts to retrieve it from Mr. Trump.

In January 2022, Mr. Trump sent 15 boxes of government documents from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives, which found they contained nearly 200 classified documents. That prompted federal prosecutors to issue subpoenas in May for any additional materials with secret markings still in Mr Trump’s possession. In June 2022, after conducting a diligent search of Mar-a-Lago, one of the former president’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, gave the government another batch of 38 classified documents.

But even after those first two batches of documents were returned, prosecutors suspected that Mr. Trump had additional classified material at his residence in Mar-a-Lago and in an adjacent area. Mr. Nauta’s surveillance footage was apparently just one piece of evidence supporting that belief. A long portion of the affidavit that follows prosecutors’ allegation that Mr. Trump did not return everything he should have had remains sealed.

It was Judge Reinhart who issued the Mar-a-Lago search warrant last August, which led to federal agents removing more than 100 documents with classification marks.

Judge Reinhart has also been appointed as magistrate for the prosecution of Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta. Mr. Nauta will appear in Federal District Court in Miami on Thursday.

Among the new details revealed on Wednesday was that neither Mr Corcoran nor any of Mr Trump’s other lawyers had told prosecutors that the former president had released any of the 38 classified documents handed over last June. That omission seemed to contradict an earlier statement the lawyers made to the government, in which they claimed that as president, Mr. Trump had “absolute authority” to release any material he wanted.

The newly unredacted portions of the affidavit also say that Mr. Corcoran told the government that he was informed that there were no classified documents “in a private office space or other location in Mar-a-Lago” — a claim that the search for the property turned out to be false.

In March, a federal judge in Washington compelled Mr. Corcoran to provide records and testify before a grand jury investigating the case, bypassing the usual protections of attorney-client privilege, because she believed Mr. Trump had betrayed Mr. Corcoran misled about where sensitive data was kept in Mar-a-Lago.

Despite all the attention during the investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified documents about Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club and residence, another property owned by Mr. Trump has played a crucial, albeit quieter, role in the business: his 520-acre golf club in Bedminster, NJ

Mar-a-Lago made headlines last August after federal agents descended on the compound and snatched away a trove of more than 100 classified documents, and photos of boxes of presidential documents piled there — including in a bathroom — helped explain why prosecutors chose to indict him this month.

But Bedminster, where Mr. Trump spends his summers, also appears to have been a focus of investigators, a focal point in the conflict between prosecutors and Mr. Trump’s lawyers, and the scene of a pivotal episode in Mr. Trump: A rally in which he was recorded showing off what he described as a “highly confidential” plan to attack Iran.

That audio recording, published Monday by The New York Times, was the latest piece of evidence that puts Bedminster on nearly equal footing with Mar-a-Lago as a key location in the case being prosecuted against Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Previously unreported details of the investigation show prosecutors working for Mr Smith subpoenaed surveillance footage from Bedminster, just as they did from Mar-a-Lago, and fought a pitched battle with Mr Smith’s lawyers late last year. Trump on how best to search the New Jersey estate.

At one point in the early fall of last year, investigators even went so far as to discuss the execution of a search warrant in Bedminster, according to two people briefed on the matter. Investigators were concerned that more documents were stashed in the club and the only way to account for them was to search the premises. But one of the people said the Justice Department probably had no reason to get an order from a judge.

The discussions about the order took place around the time that Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, told Mr. Trump’s legal team that prosecutors believed Mr. Trump had further classified material in his possession.

Mr. Trump acquired Bedminster in 2002 and uses it as a seasonal getaway from both New York and South Florida. The property’s role as a summer residence figured in the suit filed by Mr Smith: Prosecutors said Mr Trump’s co-defendant in the case, Walt Nauta, loaded Mar-a-Lago boxes onto a plane “that flew Trump and his family up north for the summer” on the same day Mr. Bratt showed up in Florida to collect all the classified documents that were left there.

As for the recording of Mr Trump, it was taken in Bedminster in July 2021 at a meeting attended by two of his aides – identified by people in the know as Margo Martin and Liz Harrington, who have seen some of Mr Trump attended. Trump’s book interviews that summer — as well as by a publisher and writer working on a memoir for Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last White House chief of staff.

On the recording, Mr. Trump can be heard rustling through the papers and describing to his guests a “secret” plan regarding Iran that he said was drawn up by General Mark A. Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Department of Defense. Mr. Trump described the document in an attempt to refute one bill that General Milley feared having to dissuade him from triggering a crisis with Iran in the period after Mr Trump lost his re-election bid at the end of 2020.

“This totally wins my case, you know,” Trump says, adding that the papers he apparently showed were “highly confidential” and “secret.”

One of the women heard speaking on the tape was Mrs. Harrington, three experts said. Ms. Harrington, one of the most aggressive defenders of Mr. Trump on Twitter, did not respond to questions about whether she is one of the voices talking on the recording as Mr. Trump appears to be showing a piece of paper.

Mrs. Harrington; Mrs. Martin, who worked for Mr. Trump in the White House; and the other participants in the meeting could be key witnesses if Mr. Trump’s case goes to trial, as they can describe firsthand what he showed when he discussed the Iran plan. A lawyer for Ms Martin declined to comment.

People close to Mr Trump have suggested that the recording does not specify whether Mr Trump actually showed anyone a confidential document – and he told Fox News’ Bret Baier last week that there was “no document”. Yet the indictment clearly states in its first few pages that he presented a document, a claim that appears to be supported by his own words, as recorded in the recording.

In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Trump did not repeat the claim that there was no document, but insisted he had done nothing wrong.

“I said it very clearly – I had a whole desk full of papers, mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories, dealing with a lot of subjects, and what was said was absolutely fine,” said Mr. Trump, when asked how he reconciled the recording with what he told Mr. Baier. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I do things right. I am a legitimate person.”

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr Trump, said the full context of the recording showed the former president did “nothing wrong at all”.

Shortly after the Bedminster rally, people in Mr Trump’s orbit knew something unusual had happened, according to a person with knowledge of the events.

The indictment describes Mr Trump’s meeting with the people working on the book and members of his staff, “none of whom had security clearance”. It also says that Mr. Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack’.”

Mr. Meadows’ book contains a reference to a document that he claimed Mr. Trump said General Milley had typed himself.

“The president recalls a four-page report typed by Mark Milley himself,” Mr. Meadows’ book read. “It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, which would involve deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump on more than one occasion during his presidency. President Trump rejected those requests every time.”

People close to General Milley have denied that he pushed to attack Iran.

Mr. Smith’s indictment suggests prosecutors obtained a large amount of Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage, some of which show Mr. Nauta, Mr. Trump’s co-defendant and personal assistant, moving boxes in and out of a storage unit . in the basement of the complex.

The move of those boxes — undertaken at the request of Mr Trump, prosecutors say — is at the heart of a conspiracy charge accusing Mr Trump and Mr Nauta of obstructing the administration’s efforts to recover all classified material. to demand that Mr. Trump take. him from the White House.

But prosecutors have also issued at least one subpoena for surveillance camera footage from Bedminster, according to two people familiar with the case. The subpoena for those images came some time after the government’s request for the Mar-a-Lago footage, the people said, though it remains unclear what the footage shows or exactly why prosecutors sought to obtain it.

One thing is certain, though: Even after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Bratt and his team remained concerned that Mr. Trump was still holding classified documents in violation of a subpoena for them the administration had made. issued three months earlier. So in September — a month after the Mar-a-Lago search — prosecutors reached out to Trump representatives to give the former president another chance to return relevant material, according to sealed court documents described in The Times.

Initially, Mr. Trump’s lawyers refused to further search his property or provide an affidavit declaring that everything had been turned over, the court documents said, according to a person who was aware of its contents. Their refusal caused the lawyers to question the scope and validity of the initial subpoena and argue that Mr. Trump’s presidential office could incriminate itself if more classified documents were discovered and returned.

The government responded by filing a motion to enforce compliance with the original subpoena, and a hearing was scheduled for late October for Judge Beryl A. Howell, who was then the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington.

One of Mr Trump’s former lawyers, Timothy Parlatore, has since suggested that Boris Epshteyn, another lawyer close to Mr Trump, “tried to interfere” with searches ordered by Trump’s legal team around that time . Mr. Parlatore made the comments about Mr. Epshteyn in a CNN interview last month citing his differences with Mr. Epshteyn as a major reason he had resigned as Mr. Trump’s representative. (He later said Mr Epshteyn was not at fault and called it a disagreement.)

Minutes before the hearing before Judge Howell, Mr Parlatore warned her and the government that a team of professionals with military training had searched Bedminster for classified material only days earlier. They were accompanied by another of Mr. Trump’s lawyers at the time, James Trusty.

But the Justice Department was unimpressed, according to court documents. Prosecutors complained that the search was limited to certain areas of Bedminster and was not accompanied by an affidavit detailing which areas of the club had been investigated.

Ultimately, Judge Howell ruled in favor of the government and ordered Mr Trump’s lawyers to take an affidavit about which parts of Bedminster had been searched. She also told the lawyers to make available a “custodian of records” for Trump’s presidential office to testify about the search before a grand jury.

Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum And Adam Goldman reporting contributed.

The day before a key meeting last year between an attorney for former President Donald J. Trump and officials seeking to recover classified documents in Mr. Trump’s possession, a maintenance worker from the former president’s private club saw an aide move boxes to a storage space, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The maintenance worker offered to help the aide — Walt Nauta, Mr. Trump’s valet at the White House — move the boxes and eventually lend a hand. But the worker had no idea what was in the boxes, said the person familiar with the case. The maintenance worker shared that account with federal prosecutors, the person said.

The employee’s account is potentially important to prosecutors as they gather details about how Mr. Trump handled sensitive documents he took with him when he left the White House, and whether he undertook efforts by the Justice Department and the National Archives to retrieve them. recovery hindered.

Mr. Trump was found to have kept some documents in the storage room where Mr. Nauta and the maintenance worker were moving boxes the day before the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence officer, Jay Bratt, last traveled to Mar-a-Lago June to request the return of all government materials in the former president’s possession.

Mr. Nauta and the worker took the boxes to the room before the storage unit was searched that same day by M. Evan Corcoran, an attorney for Mr. Trump who was in conversation with Mr. Bratt. Mr. Corcoran called Justice Department officials that evening to set up a meeting for the following day. He believed he did not have security clearance to carry documents with secret markings, a person familiar with his decision said.

Weeks earlier, the Justice Department had issued a subpoena demanding the return of the documents. Prosecutors have been trying to determine whether Mr. Trump had documents moved at Mar-a-Lago or tried to hide some of them after the subpoena.

Part of their interest is trying to determine if any documents were moved before Mr. Corcoran himself went through the boxes ahead of a meeting with Justice Department officials who wanted to retrieve them. Prosecutors have asked witnesses about the role of Mr. Nauta and the maintenance worker, whose names have not been made public, in moving documents around that time.

During his trip to Mar-a-Lago on June 3, Mr. Bratt delivered a package of about three dozen documents with secret markings from an attorney to Mr. Trump. Mr. Bratt also received a letter, drafted by Mr. Corcoran but signed by another attorney for the former president, confirming that additional material had been diligently sought in response to the subpoena and none had been found. Mr. Bratt was not allowed access to search the storage room at the time.

The detail about the timing of Mr. Nauta’s interaction with the maintenance worker was previously reported by The Washington Post. A lawyer for Mr Nauta declined to comment. A lawyer for the maintenance worker would not discuss the matter publicly.

The New York Times reported this month that prosecutors had obtained cooperation from a witness who worked at Mar-a-Lago. The witness provided the investigators with, among other things, a photo of the salvage.

The investigation, overseen by Special Counsel, Jack Smith, is showing signs of entering its final phase, and this week lawyers for Mr Trump — who is the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — called for a meeting to discuss the matter with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, called the investigation a “targeted, politically motivated witch hunt against President Trump designed to interfere with elections and prevent the American people from sending him back to the White House.”

He added that prosecutors have been harassing “anyone and anyone who works, has worked or supports President Trump” and alleged that Mr. Trump had attempted to cooperate with the Justice Department.

Prosecutors have questioned witnesses about Mr Trump’s possible motive for having the documents.

They have subpoenaed information about Mr. Trump’s business dealings with foreign countries since he became president. And witnesses have told them that some aides may have known that Mr. Trump still had documents in his possession after the first 15 boxes of government materials — found to contain classified documents — were turned over to the National Archives in January 2022 after sustained efforts. by the archives to retrieve the material, said persons informed.

One of the most prominent witnesses in recent months was Mr Corcoran, who met with Mr Bratt of the Justice Department last June and drafted the letter stating that a diligent search had turned up no further documents.

In March, prosecutors successfully breached Mr Corcoran’s attorney-client privilege with Mr Trump under the crime-fraud exception, a provision of the law that can be used when investigators have evidence that the services of an attorney may have been used in the commission of a crime. crime.

Judge Beryl A. Howell, then the chief judge presiding over grand jury cases in Washington’s Federal District Court, found that prosecutors had provided sufficient evidence that Mr. Trump knowingly misled Mr. Corcoran about the documents he still owned.

The Times previously reported that Judge Howell, writing in a sealed memorandum, described what she called Mr Trump’s “deception” in his dealings with the National Archives in 2021 and early last year, saying it was “apparently a dress rehearsal” was for how he handled the grand jury subpoena last May, according to a person who was aware of the contents of the memo.

In the sealed memo outlining her rationale for ruling that Mr. Corcoran should not be protected by attorney-client privilege, Judge Howell cited numerous examples of what prosecutors considered evidence of possible obstruction and unlawful possession of government materials on the case from Mr. Trump. share, said the person who knew about the content.

“Other evidence shows that the former president deliberately tried to withhold classified documents when he was not authorized to do so, and he knew it,” Ms Howell wrote, the person said.

Judge Howell acknowledged that the standard to meet the crime-fraud exception is lower than what would be required to press charges or win a jury verdict, the person familiar with what she wrote said. Still, the judge made it clear that she believed the government had reached the threshold, both for obstructing the grand jury’s proceedings and for “unauthorized retention of national defense information,” the person said.

“The administration has provided sufficient evidence that the former president possessed tangible documents containing national defense information,” she wrote, adding that they showed that he “did not deliver those documents to an officer entitled to receive them.”

At another time, Judge Howell spoke about Mr Trump’s intent and state of mind and said the administration had also provided sufficient evidence to show that the former president had deliberately withheld the classified documents, the person said.

She also noted that a further search of Trump properties late last year, conducted by experts on behalf of Trump after pressure from prosecutors, turned up additional documents with secret markings in his bedroom at Mar-a-Lago, the person responsible for the document had been informed. said.

“In particular, no excuse is given for how the former president could have missed the secret-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago,” Judge Howell wrote, according to the person briefed on the contents. from her memo.