The affidavit by the FBI in support of obtaining a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is photographed Friday, Aug. 26, 2022. U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered the Justice Department to make public a redacted version of the affidavit it relied on when federal agents searched Trump’s estate to look for classified documents. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 10:12 AM PT – Saturday, August 27, 2022
Lawmakers are outraged at the heavy redactions in the highly anticipated affidavit used to obtain a search warrant for the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
20 of the 38-pages that were released on Friday were either significantly or fully redacted. However, page-19 of the affidavit may point to the can of worms that the Department of Justice (DOJ) knows it opened by ransacking the 45th President’s Florida home earlier this month.
Page 19 cited a Breitbart article from May 5, 2022. That article stated that former Trump administration official, Kash Patel, said the 15-boxes of documents had already been declassified but that the classification markings had not been updated.
Patel maintained that President Trump retained and declassified those documents in anticipation of leaving government. He said that Trump did this because he thought the American public should have the right to read it for themselves.
“The President, by law, is the ultimate arbiter of the classification authority. If he says it, it’s declassified,” stated Patel. “It doesn’t need to go through the bureaucratic rigmarole (and) be written down in appropriate style. That’s not what the constitution says.”
Patel also vocalized that reports claiming that Trump took classified information are completely false and is just another disinformation campaign against him.
Trump appointed Patel alongside John Solomon in June as his representative for access to Presidential records. As the former Pentagon Chief of Staff, Patel explained that all previously classified documents have classification markings on them. This simply means they used to be classified. He added that “government simpletons” did not follow the President’s orders to have them marked as “declassified,” which he did and has the unilateral authority to do.
“When these rubes get in the way because they say ‘ohh well you know so-and-so didn’t sign the letter, White House counsel didn’t do this’ that’s a farce,” remarked Patel. “And not only did the President do it by writing in October of 2020, he did it verbally at least, to the best of my recollection, multiple times in the whole sets of documents.”
Patel did not go into specifics about the document, but he said they contain information on Russiagate and the Ukraine impeachment fiasco which Trump wanted the public to have access to. The former Pentagon Chief of Staff suggested that the documents may have selectively be leaked to advance a false political narrative. Patel posted a statement on Truth Social shortly after the redacted affidavit was released.
From Kash Patel on Truth Social: pic.twitter.com/Upg4d7lPAv
— Kristina Wong 🇺🇸 (@kristina_wong) August 26, 2022