Recently unsealed court motions showed that eight search warrants and affidavits were filed in connection to former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents case.
Prosecutors filed a motion last month asking for permission to disclose the warrants and other documents to the legal teams of Trump and his personal valet, Walt Nauta, who were both criminally charged for mishandling classified documents at the ex-president’s West Palm Beach estate, according to NBC News.
The unsealed motion also indicated that prosecutors have not shared the “contents, locations, or devices sought by the search warrant” with the public, and asked that the court keep that information private.
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance called the development “fascinating.”
“One of which was the warrant for last August’s search of Mar a Lago. But what about the others?” tweeted MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin.
The general public was aware of one of the warrants, which was used to initiate a sweeping search of Mar-a-Lago led by the FBI in August of 2022. NBC reported that though there are an additional seven warrants, it does not necessarily mean that federal authorities also scoured that same amount of physical locations, and could have been for electronic devices, storage facilities, and other parts of Mar-a-Lago.
“Remember this could well be about search warrants for email accounts, not just physical locations,” New York University Law Prof. Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, wrote on Twitter.
Federal prosecutors pushed for the other warrants to remain shielded from public knowledge, writing in the motion, “The government, accordingly, has never publicly revealed the existence of any of its search warrant applications, or even the number of warrants at issue; it sought a limited unsealing of the instant search warrant application only after the former President publicly revealed its existence.”
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Gabriella Ferrigine
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