A day after the affidavit was released, former President Trump’s legal team questioned the heavily redacted document, claiming that it has “raised more questions than answers.”
Trump’s lawyers requested the motion for a “special master,” citing the unsealing of the redacted affidavit as a reason to the judge. His legal team said they want a neutral third party to be appointed to oversee the Department of Justice handling the evidence.
Roughly 20 out of the 38-page document was fully or almost entirely blacked out, while another 24 pages had a significant amount of information blacked out.
The former president’s legal team argued that the redacted affidavit provides almost no reason to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
“The Redacted Affidavit underscores why this Motion should be granted, as it provides almost no information that would allow Movant to understand why the raid took place, or what was taken from his home," Trump’s attorneys wrote.
“The few lines that are un-redacted raise more questions than answers. For instance, Paragraph 3 states, in pertinent part, as one of the bases for probable cause, that there ‘are Presidential records subject to record retention requirements currently remain[ing] at the PREMISES,” the legal team continued.
Trump’s legal team said that not only was his Florida residence attacked, the affidavit proves that the raid on the former president’s home was “deeply troubling.”
“This provides the deeply troubling prospect that President Trump’s home was raided under a pretense of a suspicion that Presidential records were on his property – even though the Presidential Records Act is not a criminally-enforceable statute,” the attorneys said.
The heavily redacted affidavit provides key details that the attack on Trump’s home was unprecedented, and provided no reason to infringe upon his personal belongings.
In a Truth Social Post following the document release, Trump expressed his rage for the judge who green lighted the raid, arguing that the judge never should have allowed the FBI to break into Trump’s home.