Judge unseals more of affidavit used to seek Mar-a-Lago search warrant

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.