Newly unsealed sections of the search warrant authorizing FBI agents to raid former President Donald Trump's home last year suggest that he was attempting "significant obstruction," according to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.
Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered that "additional portions" of the search warrant be made public on Wednesday. Several parts of the document remain blacked out. Reinhart unsealed the new sections while denying a request from multiple media organizations to release the full, unredacted version.
The newly released parts of the warrant reveal that surveillance camera footage taken from Trump's Mar-a-Lago home show boxes being moved out of a storage area shortly before Department of Justice (DOJ) investigators visited the home to collect classified and sensitive documents in June 2022.
Trump was charged last month with multiple federal crimes related to his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House and his alleged attempts to obstruct justice when asked to return the records. The ex-president pleaded not guilty to 37 felony counts and claims that he is the victim of a political "witch hunt."
Vance said in a tweet on Wednesday that the unredacted portions of the warrant show that DOJ investigators already had "early evidence" last year to justify obstruction charges against the former president.
"It looks like DOJ knew, when they asked for the search warrant, that a significant number of boxes Trump took out of the WH weren't included in the storage area he identified as the only repository of his materials," Vance tweeted. "Early evidence of significant obstruction of the investigation."
Newsweek has reached out to the office of Trump via email for comment.
Former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig also suggested during a broadcast on Wednesday that the new sections of the search warrant could be significant because they shed new light on the storage room that Trump's team erroneously told officials held all of his classified documents.
Trump and his aide Walt Nauta are both accused of moving boxes of documents from the storage unit in an attempt to hide the records from federal agents, which, Honig said, was "the basis" for obstruction charges against both men.
"The storage room is a pivotal location in this whole story," Honig said. "The intentional movement of documents by Donald Trump and his co-defendant Walt Nauta, into and out of that storage room, have become now the basis for the obstruction of justice charges. And so, this tells us that DOJ prosecutors were onto that very early."
Honig went on to note that, unlike the public, Trump and Nauta would be able to see the full version of the search warrant, with their lawyers likely using the information to help craft a defense that challenges the "legality of the search."
Nauta is set to be arraigned in Florida on Thursday on six federal felony counts. Trump's trial is expected to begin later this year.
