What do the American people actually know now that the 38-page affidavit tied to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago has been released? Not as much as might be expected.
The document was heavily redacted but laid out a rationale for the raid.
The New York Post reported The West Palm Beach US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhardt had ordered the Justice Department earlier in the week to prepare a redacted version of the document in which authorities laid out their reasons for the controversial Aug. 8 search-and-seizure operation at Mar-a-Lago.
Reinhardt calls the need for the release of the affidavit an “intense public and historical interest” and this was released, but not in full.
The New York Post describes censored portions as “huge” including “vast swaths”
And sometimes even multiple pages at once.
Even the section that apparently gave the FBI probable cause to execute the warrant is redacted.
The FBI claims that the purpose of censoring material is to “protect the safety and privacy of a significant number of civilian witnesses, in addition to law enforcement personnel, as well as to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.”
The affidavit reveals absolutely no new information about the 11 classified, secret, and top secret documents allegedly recovered from Trump’s Palm Beach home.
There continues to be no word on whether or not the documents had in fact been declassified by the former President and his attorney have claimed.
“The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified,” said former Trump Aide Kash Patel.
Patel continued, “I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information.’ ”
The affidavit made mention of Patel’s comments, but his words are followed by two whole entire pages of redacted information unable to be viewed by the American people.
This section likely talks about the possibility of the information being declassified.