Judge unseals less redacted version of affidavit used for Mar-a-Lago search warrant
By Marshall Cohen
A newly unsealed version of the affidavit that federal investigators used to secure a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago revealed some previously unknown details about the classified materials that former President Donald Trump gave to the Justice Department under subpoena in June.
The less-redacted version of the previously released affidavit was unsealed Tuesday by a federal judge in Florida.
It was previously known that Trump’s lawyers provided one envelope to investigators, which contained 38 unique documents with classification markings, according to court filings. But the newly lifted redactions in the search warrant affidavit indicate that some of those classified files contained markings for “HCS, SI and FISA,” according to court filings made public on Tuesday.
These classification markings indicate that the documents were connected to extremely sensitive government programs. “HCS” refers to human sources, or spies, that often work with the CIA. “SI” refers to signals intercepts that are typically handled by the National Security Agency. And “FISA” refers to domestic surveillance and wiretaps related to counterintelligence.
These new revelations confirm for the first time that documents related to these sensitive programs were returned to the US government as part of the June subpoena. Previous court filings indicated that when Trump voluntarily returned 15 boxes of materials to the National Archives in January, they contained 184 classified documents, including some with the same HCS, SI and FISA labels, as well as other classification markings.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
