President Donald Trump's Justice Department asked a judge for a delay that would keep the warrant for the unusual raid on the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) secret through the midterm elections.
Lawyers in U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office asked Chief Judge James Boasberg in a motion filed Wednesday to push back the deadlines for answering three requests to unseal the warrant records.
Neither of the two timelines the government proposed would release the records before the election on Nov. 3.
“[G]ood cause exists to extend these deadlines until after the subject search warrant has been fully executed,” the motion insists.
The motion does not say when that will happen or what work remains. The government also asked to submit its reasons in a separate, sealed, ex parte memo, meaning only the judge would see it.
Under the government’s main proposal, the motion says, a new deadline for its response would be set only after the warrant’s execution is complete. The DOJ would then have 30 days to notify the court, and the two sides would get another week to confer and file a joint report on “next steps,” the government wrote.
If Boasberg declines to wait, the government asked him to make Nov. 9 the deadline for all three requests, the date he had already set for the request filed by the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, the motion says. That is six days after the election.
The groups behind all three requests, including 14 news organizations and The New York Times, oppose the delay, according to the filing.
In their Oct. 15 request, the news organizations cited a 2008 ruling from the same court that found “the routine practice is to make warrant materials publicly available after a search has been executed and a return is available.” A return lists the items agents seized.
In a response to government lawyers that was attached to the motion, the Times wrote, “We are also perplexed regarding what ‘execution’ you refer to. As has been well-publicized, the Government executed the search warrant on October 12, 2026, and subpoenas have been served on Rep. Omar’s family members.”
“The public’s immediate right of access obviously would be thwarted by an effectively unlimited suspension of the Government’s deadline to respond to The Times’s Application,” the Times argued.
“The continuing lack of transparency surrounding the search warrant and related filings is especially intolerable in the run-up to an election in which Rep. Omar is a candidate for office,” the Times added.
Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington home on Oct. 12 in what the Justice Department called an “ongoing federal criminal investigation,” CNN reported.
Omar is running for reelection, and the outlet reported that the department rarely takes such an aggressive step against a candidate so close to an election.
The Times wants the government held to its current deadline of Thursday, which Boasberg set on Oct. 15 for both the Times and the news organizations, according to the filings.
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