The US Justice Department has rebuffed efforts to make public the affidavit supporting the search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s estate in Florida, saying the investigation “implicates highly classified material” and the document contains sensitive information about witnesses.
The government’s opposition came on Monday in response to court filings by several news organisations who wanted to unseal the paperwork the Justice Department submitted when it asked for the warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.
The court filing - from a US attorney in Miami and a senior national security figure at the Justice Department - argued that making the affidavit public would “cause significant and irreparable damage to this ongoing criminal investigation.”
The document, the prosecutors say, details “highly sensitive information about witnesses,” including people who have been interviewed by the government, and contains confidential grand jury information.
The government told a federal magistrate judge that prosecutors believe some additional records, including the cover sheet for the warrant and the government’s request to seal the documents, should now be made public.
A property receipt unsealed Friday showed the FBI seized 11 sets of classified documents, with some not only marked top secret but also “sensitive compartmented information,” a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets that if revealed publicly could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to U.S. interests. The court records did not provide specific details about information the documents might contain.
The Justice Department acknowledged Monday that its ongoing criminal investigation “implicates highly classified
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