A federal judge’s decision to order the release of an affidavit used in the FBI’s investigation of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort will likely spell more bad news for the former president, legal experts say. Judge Bruce Rinehart on Thursday ordered the document, which will contain Justice Department filings, to be released by noon Friday. The document, in its unredacted form, describes the evidence underlying the warrant used in the Aug. 8 search, but the Justice Department successfully argued that releasing all the evidence could jeopardize its ongoing investigation . The warrant itself revealed that agents believed Trump may have violated the Espionage Act — which prohibits the mishandling of information sensitive to US national security — but did not specify why. But even in a revised form, the document will be damaging to Trump, legal experts say. The former president tried to portray the investigation as part of a conspiracy by his political enemies based on scant evidence, but the document will likely indicate the strength of the evidence the FBI acted on, they said. “I can’t imagine that Trump is going to be happy with this document, given the fact that it was an advocacy document that was written to persuade the judge to find probable cause to investigate,” said John Dean, an attorney and key witness in the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, he told CNN on Thursday. “This is not a document that’s going to do a lot of good for Donald Trump — quite the opposite, in fact. So I think he’s going to be very unhappy with what he finds and what comes out and it’s not going to be good for Donald Trump ». Bradley Moss, a national security attorney, echoed that view. “Whatever comes out of this tomorrow, I don’t think Trump’s people realize how bad it could look for him. It won’t be pretty,” he tweeted. Moss said the documents could provide details of what happened between February — after the National Archives and Records Administration discovered there was classified information in a batch of documents returned to them by Trump — and August, when the investigation was conducted . He also said the documents could refer to the “moving or relocation” of the files from a Mar-a-Lago warehouse, where they were kept. The New York Times previously reported that agents were asked to seek their search warrant at Mar-a-Lago after becoming concerned about video showing people entering and exiting the warehouse. On PBS, national security lawyer Mark Zaid warned that while the general public would likely be “very disappointed” by the document, experts could probably glean interesting new information about the investigation, given the potentially expansive nature of the filings. Trump has called for the full release of the affidavit and tried to portray efforts to withhold information from the public as efforts to hide evidence of the conspiracy against him. The former president has long portrayed himself as the victim of a conspiracy by the so-called “deep state” of hostile officials and their Democratic allies. But that strategy backfired this week after John Solomon, a Trump ally, released a letter in May from the National Archives to Trump’s lawyers that revealed the extent of classified information Trump took with him. Solomon said the letter contained evidence of a White House conspiracy against Trump, while experts said it actually revealed the highly classified nature of the information Trump had at Mar-a-Lago and the FBI’s urgent desire to inspect it. . Zaid said the more information is released, the worse it would be for Trump. “Most of the information coming out, contrary to what the Trump team is saying and encouraging it to happen, actually undermines their own legal arguments and public policy stance,” he said. Trump’s representatives did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
