Judge Orders DOJ To Respond To Requests To Unseal FBI’s Trump Warrant

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former President Donald Trump waves while walking to a vehicle outside of Trump Tower in New York on Aug. 10, 2022. (Stringer/AFP via Getty Images)

The Justice Department has to respond to motions to unseal a warrant that triggered the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search.

Judicial Watch and the Albany Times Union newspaper filed a motion to unseal the document earlier this week, which was granted by a judge in the case.

“On or before 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 15, 2022, the Government shall file a Response to the Motion to Unseal,” wrote Judge Bruce Reinhart on Wednesday afternoon, referring to the Department of Justice.

“The response may be filed ex parte and under seal as necessary to avoid disclosing matters already under seal. In that event, the Government shall file a redacted Response in the public record. If it chooses, the Government may file a consolidated Response to all Motions to Seal,” he wrote.

Neither the FBI nor Justice Department has issued public comments about the raid, which was first confirmed by Trump on Monday evening.

The FBI declined to comment when contacted by The Epoch Times, and the Justice Department has not responded to several requests for comment.

As for the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden was not aware of the raid before Trump’s announcement. Her claim was refuted by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.”

Requests

On Wednesday, the Times Union’s managing editor, Brendan J. Lyons, wrote to Reinhart to ask for the warrant to be unsealed.

“Given that the search warrant(s) have been executed, and the target of that search has full knowledge of what occurred, there is no impediment to any ongoing investigation from the disclosure of the search warrant order or the returns. As such, these records should be unsealed,” the letter to the Florida judge reads.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-A-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)

Judicial Watch asked for the warrant as part of an investigation into “the potential politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice and whether the FBI and the Justice Department are abusing their law enforcement powers to harass a likely future political opponent of President [Joe] Biden.”

“If the Court were to unseal the materials, Judicial Watch would obtain the materials, analyze them, and make them available to the public,” the letter said. “Unsealing the records therefore would further Judicial Watch’s mission of educating the public.”

It comes as Eric Trump, a son of the former president, told the Daily Mail that a Trump attorney at Mar-a-Lago, Christina Bobb, asked FBI agents Monday about seeing a warrant.

“They would not give her the search warrant,” he told the outlet, referring to Bobb. “So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”

Top Republicans, meanwhile, demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms. Some have said the Justice Department immediately needs to release documents pertaining to the raid.

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