U.S. Rep. Turner pressing for release of sealed affidavit from FBI raid at Trump’s Florida residence

DAYTON — U.S. Rep. Mike Turner made it clear to News Center 7 in stating unequivocally that he wants to see the currently sealed documents seized in the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago.

“We deal with classified material,” Turner, a Republican who is on the House Intelligence Committee and whose district covers Montgomery, Greene and Fayette counties, said Wednesday to News Center 7′s Molly Koweek.

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“A raid is the most intrusive and invasive action that the FBI and the Department of Justice could take,” the congressman said. “They had many other options before they got to that point.”

The FBI recovered “top secret” and even more sensitive documents from Trump’s estate in Florida, according to court papers released Aug. 12 after a federal judge unsealed the warrant that authorized the unprecedented search on Aug. 8. A property receipt unsealed by the court shows FBI agents took 11 sets of classified records from the estate that include some marked top secret and also marked “sensitive compartmented information,” a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets that if revealed publicly could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to U.S. interests.

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Specific details about the information contained in the documents was not divulged in the court records.

U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the nation’s intelligence agencies, said, “The statutes the Justice Department are asserting in the search warrant, don’t even require that they still be classified. If they would be damaging to national security, it’s a problem. It’s a major problem.”

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Turner said what he disputes is the fairness of the search.

“Obviously this is a suspect raid, where you have the rival of President Biden, you have the attorney general himself having his career derailed from headed toward the Supreme Court by Donald Trump, and you have this unequal application of the law, where Hillary Clinton had accusations of the same thing of, of classified material,” Turner said.

Turner said he wants to see the affidavit -- the document the Justice Department gave the judge who approved the search.

“What did they tell the court that they were going to find, and then we need to see the documents,” Turner said. “What did they find? How does this rise to a national security threat that’s of the highest level to actually raid a man’s home and then spend nine hours there. These are questions that the attorney general and the FBI are going to have to answer.”

A federal judge did unseal the search warrant and property receipts, a decision the Justice Department supported.

Monday, DOJ officials said they opposed releasing the affidavit to protect witnesses and methods, and to keep grand jury proceedings confidential.

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