DOJ had Trump nailed on obstruction long before anyone realized: legal expert
The Justice Department on Monday released a new, less-redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago last year, which formed a critical part of the investigation preceding former President Donald Trump's indictment under the Espionage Act.
There was not an enormous amount of new information in the unredactions — however, one thing that did stick out to former federal prosecutor Elie Honig was new information about the storage room, suggesting federal investigators knew more than previously understood about Trump's orders to subordinates to move around the boxes to hide them from investigators — which forms the backbone of the obstruction of justice charges against him.
"These details, as we know them so far, how significant are they in this affidavit that is now less redacted?" CNN anchor Alex Marquardt asked Honig. "What are we really learning from this affidavit with the details that have not been redacted?"
"Yeah, Alex, so Katelyn [Polantz] said there's new information in there about the storage room," said Honig. "The storage room is pivotal location in this whole story, because the intentional movement of documents by Donald Trump and his co-defendant Walt Nauta, into and out of that storage room, have now become the basis for the obstruction of justice charges, and so this tells us that DOJ prosecutors were onto that very early."
Another important thing to consider, Honig added, is that "while we in the public are seeing apparently still fairly heavily redacted version of this document, Donald Trump and Walt Nauta, as the criminal defendants in this case, they will get the whole thing."
"They are going to use that as the basis to challenge the legality of the search," Honig continued. "Nothing unusual about that. Virtually everyone who does get searched will bring a challenge. They will argue there was not probable cause or that the search exceeded the legal bounds. So that's an important discovery and motion dispute that's coming up later in this case."
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