more inside as to what led to the approval for that search warrant and the what the underlying basis for this criminal investigation is. abby, we ve just hit noon. we re expecting more activity on the court s docket very shortly. we ll keep checking it and get back to you as soon as something is filed. jessica, stand by. we ll get back with you as soon as you have that document. joining me around the table is elliott williams and cnn legal and national security analyst carrie cordero. while everybody is hitting refresh right now, we have a moment where the judge in this case has said, government, i agree with your decision to redact certain elements of it, but yet he still sees fit to release this document. elliot, what sddoes that tell y? it s important to take a step back and what the law governing all of this is. in criminal proceedings, documents are presumed proceedings are presumed to be open, right? that s put in the constitution. things should be open. we have a
probable cause to believe that additional documents have contained classified national defense information or that are presidential records subject to record retention requirements currently remain at the premise. and this is snichignificant. there is also evidence to believe that obstruction will be founding at the premises. this is why the fbi believed they had to take this extraordinary step was that they believed they could find evidence of obstruction not just the storage of classified information in an unsecure way but just the idea that there might be obstruction, which we don t know a lot more about what that is. but it really says that they were concerned perhaps about the destruction of evidence or other methods to try to evade what the fbi was trying to investigate. evan, let s go to jessica schneider right now as well and bring her into the conversation.
safety. so the doj making clear here how dangerous this would be. the memorandum of law goes on not only to talk about witnesses, but to talk about how they have to keep the information about the road map to the investigation under wraps because, abby, as we ve repeatedly said, this is an investigation that s ongoing. it is very unprecedented to unseal an affidavit before charges have been filed and that s exactly what the judge is doing in this case. so the doj laying out exactly why much of this affidavit needs to be redacted, remain sealed. so still waiting on the affidavit itself, but getting a little bit more information from doj about why they need these necessary redactions, so stay tuned for more. jessica, we ll be back with you as soon as we have more. let s come back to the table with elliot and carrie. carrie, what do you make of the fact that this explanation of the redactions was actually released? i m not sure that was expected, but perhaps it was. so the memorandum o
criminal sanction. they were making that argument but obviously this criminal investigation continued nonetheless. it s claiming that doj is under political influence here. again, that s another argument that we ve seen trump s team repeatedly make, even though the attorney general has said that there would not be any political influence, that they would follow the facts and the law. and then it says doj must be candid with judges and present exculpatory evidence. this was the trump team pushing back in may 2022, several months before that search warrant was executed at mar-a-lago. we re still going through this document, but there s a lot to be gleaned here, in particular how trump s team was reacting to this continued investigation, their pushback, just before, several months before the search warrant as actually executed. abby. jessica, that s extraordinary information what you just read for us. but let s go back to kat katelyn polantz who has more about what is in this document t
historic day because of the nature of what we are talking about and now everyone stand by. i think we have the department of that s right, evan. the department of justice legal brief explaining the redactions has been unsealed. this is not the affidavit itself but rather the memo outlining the redactions. we re going to go to jessica schneider who has the details for us. jessica. yeah, abby. what we re getting right now is not actually the redacted affidavit but rather the memorandum of law the doj also submitted yesterday explaining the reasoning behind the need to redact a lot of this information. so it s really two different documents at this point. one of the documents is a lengthy legal explainer. the other one is pretty interesting. it goes through the exact paragraphs of this affidavit. the document i m looking at shows about 78 paragraphs of the affidavit in all and then lists all the reasons why information should be redacted. however, all of those