Judging Freedom - Judge Orders DOJ response to Unseal Trump Warrant

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Judge Orders Department of Justice to Respond to Requests to Unseal FBI’s Trump Warrant https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-o... #trump #fbi #raidSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, August 11, 2022. It's about 10.15 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. The top story, as I see it, continues to be the FBI execution of a search warrant at the home of former President Donald Trump, his mansion FBI said to the federal judge to get him to sign that search warrant and what the FBI took from his house and what the search warrant said? There is, of course, no finite answer from that. I can't give you a date when that's going to happen, but I'll tell you what the procedures are. The normal procedures are for the FBI to catalog everything that it took from the president's home and to send that inventory to the federal judge who authorized the search warrant. That document with the inventory, could be one page or could be hundreds of pages, is called a return, a return on the warrant. The judge will then examine the return to make sure that everything that was taken was within the scope of the warrant. If the judge finds something that was taken that was outside the scope of the warrant, let's say they took a pair of Melania's shoes instead of the documents they were looking for, then he would immediately of this magnitude and with this much public attention, I would imagine the FBI has been working diligently to get this done. According to eyewitnesses, they took between 12 and 15 boxes of documents.

We don't know what was in those boxes, five pages or 5,000 pages. Whatever it is, it will be cataloged. At that point, the document list is not public. The document list will only become public if somebody asks the court to release it. Now, two entities have asked the court to release it, and they're both media entities, one from Albany, New York, and the other called the Epoch Times. They've each filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal judge who signed the search warrant. They want to see the search warrant, the FBI affidavits that were submitted to the judge in order to induce him to sign the search warrant, and they want to see the return, the list of the

inventory that was taken from former President Trump's home. I don't think that motion will be granted, or if it is, it will be granted in part and denied in part, because federal law keeps secret the evidence obtained by the government when it's in the process of investigating a crime. And let's face it, the FBI is investigating a crime. They're not investigating some civil wrongdoing. They're investigating a crime. Did Donald Trump commit a crime by taking and retaining these documents? Answer, it'll depend on what the documents are. You know, if it's a napkin on which President Trump played tic-tac-toe with the

Queen of England while they were having breakfast one day, well, that belongs to the federal government, but it's probably not criminal for him to have taken it. On the other hand, if it's a top secret list of who the government thinks financed 9-11 or a list of people in the Middle East that are cooperating with our undercover agents in the intelligence community, that would be profoundly significant and utterly criminal under laws that pre-existed Trump's presidency and under a statute that he signed as president in 2018. So the federal judge, Judge Reinhart, has ordered the DOJ to respond to these Freedom of Information Act requests on Monday. But he's allowing them to respond with redactions, meaning you're not going to see who the informant was that told the FBI where these documents were and that some were in the safe,

and you're probably not going to see the documents identified. You're going to see a page, we've all seen pages like this, with blackouts on it, with words that the FBI or here the Department of Justice will reveal to Judge Reinhart, but not to the news people and not to the public. So we might learn a little bit soon. The documents are, the response by the DOJ is due on Monday. The court probably won't rule immediately. So we'll learn a little bit next week, but we won't learn the heart of what we want to know. What do we want to know? We want to see the affidavits that FBI agents submitted to the judge via the Department of Justice lawyers in advance of their meeting with the judge. And we want to see a transcript of the question and

answer, questions asked by the judge in his chambers, answers given by the FBI agents and the federal prosecutors who were in his chambers with him. That's what we want to see. And of course, we want to see the warrant itself and we want to see the return, the inventory of what was taken. Don't expect it soon. If President Trump's lawyers, pardon me, sue for it, I think that application will be denied. Why? Well, because unless and until the president is charged with a crime, he is not entitled to see the materials that were submitted to the judge in order to induce him to sign the warrant, and he's not entitled to have the warrant, and he's not entitled to see the return. If he's

charged with a crime, then his lawyers get all this stuff. I know he hopes he's not charged with a crime, and many of us do, and he would probably prefer not to be charged with the crime than have these documents. But until he's charged with the crime, he doesn't have standing. He doesn't have the right to sue for them any more than anyone else does. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.