Update 4:55 p.m. ET: Former Solicitor General Neal Katyal notes on MSNBC that one of the laws cited in 18 US Code § 1519 relates to destroying or altering documents that are evidence of the crime obstructing a government operation. Katyal points out that the search of Mar-a-Lago may also have been done to uncover what wasn’t there, i.e., what was destroyed to cover up something like, say, disrupting a session of Congress designated to certify the electors from the 2020 election.
Update 4:18 p.m. ET: First online PDF found. Read the warrant and the receipt for property here.
Update 3:58 p.m. ET:. I just need a second to process the fact that a former President of the United States was being investigated under the Espionage Act, which by statute must mean he was looking to illegally alter or steer US policies to benefit a foreign government–and that’s the GOOD scenario. The BAD scenario is he was an active agent of a foreign government, passing them information.
Update 3:32 p.m. ET: Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart didn’t just give the FBI a search warrant; he basically gave them a no-knock warrant (for a rich suburb and imposing political figure) according to the warrant text: the FBI did not have to notify Trump or his lawyers for fear that doing so would allow for the destruction of evidence.
Update 3:27 p.m. ET: Another file found on the inventory referred to “miscellaneous TS/SCI documents.” TS/SCI stands for “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information,” perhaps the highest, most protected level of classification in the US intelligence community.
Update 3:22 p.m. ET: The warrant specifies the search was for materials pertaining to the violation of three federal laws: the Espionage Act (18 U.S. Code § 793), § 1519 relating to destroying evidence of the crime obstructing a government operation, and § 2071, which covers the unlawful removal of documents.
Original 3:14 p.m. ET: The inventory of the warrant released by the Southern District of Florida federal court shows FBI agents catalogued a number of files that specify they held Top Secret or classified material, the New York Times reports.
According to Charles Savage of the Times, files list on the inventory show two entries marked “Miscellaneous Top Secret Documents,” two entries for “Miscellaneous Secret Documents,” and, for the lowest level, one entry for “Miscellaneous Confidential Documents” and another marked “Confidential Document.”