BREAKING: Justice Department Releases Redacted Mar-A-Lago Raid Affidavit

The Justice Department has just released a heavily redacted version of the affidavit which led to the warrant to raid former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. You can read that version here.

In the affidavit, the FBI alleges that 14 of the 15 boxes of documents which Trump turned over to the National Archive Records Administration, and which they reviewed earlier in the year with permission from President Biden, contained documents with “classification markings.”

“184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”

Now, for the layperson, this might seem like a HUGE deal. Top secret sounds really. . . top secret, right? Yeah, it’s actually not. It’s kind of just the general standard for professionalism in the military and the government. If it literally doesn’t matter at all, then it’s probably confidential or secret. If it matters at all, even just a little bit, then it’s top secret, which means that thousands of people likely have access to it because it’s not that difficult to get a top secret clearance. That label doesn’t necessarily indicate that the document is incredibly important or that the information contained therein must be safeguarded at all costs. It could, for example, be a century-old recipe for invisible ink which is now available at the dollar store. True story. But it sure makes it sound like a really big deal to find 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.

Interestingly, the FBI agent authoring the affidavit refers to a Breitbart article regarding those boxes of documents and to Kash Patel’s comments in that article stating that documents found at Mar-a-Lago which were marked as classified had, in fact, been declassified by then-President Donald Trump, although the classification markings had not been updated.

“The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified. I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information.’ This story is just another disinformation campaign designed to break the public trust in a president that lived on transparency. It’s yet another way to attack Trump and say he took classified information when he did not.”

Immediately following the acknowledgement that the FBI agent “is aware of” this article and these statements are several fully redacted pages. In fact, there are a bunch of pages completely redacted, which we knew is what would happen.

Speaking of redactions, they even redacted their reasons for their redactions. And they wonder why no one trusts a single thing they do anymore.