The Justice Department’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home was spurred by the discovery that he had held onto a trove of highly classified material that included documents related to the use of "clandestine human sources” in intelligence gathering, according to a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant.
The portions of the affidavit made public Friday describe the Justice Department’s monthslong push to recover sensitive materials taken from the White House by a former president who viewed state documents as his private property and now faces a department investigating the possibility he illegally obstructed those efforts.
The partial release of the 38-page affidavit was the latest in a remarkable succession of developments in the inquiry into how hundreds of pages of documents with classified markings ended up at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence after he left the White House, in apparent violation of the law requiring all presidential materials to be turned over to the National Archives.