A lawyer for former President Donald Trump predicted that “almost nothing” will be revealed if a redacted version of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) affidavit in the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid is unsealed to the public.
A judge in the case, Bruce Reinhart, ordered the Justice Department to submit its affidavit, which was used to seek the FBI’s search warrant at Trump’s property last week, with proposed redactions. Reinhart said he would then review the proposed redactions before deciding whether to make the document public.
“The Department of Justice is comfortable leaking very select pieces of information that make it look like they have something more than they actually have, so I don’t expect a lot to come out of this,” Bobb said.
The hearing involving Reinhart took place after media outlets filed lawsuits to access the affidavit. Trump and Republicans have called for it to be released, while a spokesperson for the former president said Thursday the document should be released in full without any redactions.
Thursday’s hearing also saw arguments presented by DOJ lawyers and officials. The agency’s top counterintelligence official, Jay Bratt, said that releasing the affidavit could imperil the FBI’s investigation and prevent future witnesses from providing information to the government.
A warrant and property receipt that was unsealed by Reinhart one week ago showed that FBI agents took 11 boxes of materials that contained allegedly classified information. Trump and his attorneys have said that when he was president, he issued orders to declassify materials, including documents relating to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane case.
“He’s not subject to the same declassification procedures as other government employees, so there’s nothing there. There’s no crime here,” said Bobb on Friday. “Even what they’ve alleged in the warrant and what you know what they put out in the documents yesterday, there’s nothing there, so I don’t see an indictment coming down.”
The DOJ has not elaborated on what the FBI agents were searching for at Trump’s residence. The nature of the investigation also hasn’t been publicly disclosed, although Bratt said Thursday that the agency’s investigation has “national security overtones.”
On Friday, Bobb, who was at Mar-a-Lago during the raid, also questioned the timing of the FBI’s search. It was Trump on Aug.8 who announced the search on his Truth Social platform.
“I honestly think they were trying to keep it quiet,” Bobb told the outlet. “That’s the way they were acting when they were there. We had kept the grand jury subpoena quiet, so I honestly think that they thought they could just steamroll through and not be held accountable at all.”
