Like a ghost from a forgotten time long ago...

I read the unredacted and redacted memos released this week so you don't have to

Part of a page from FBI search warrant affidavit

This was the week that was, when it came to releasing previously secret stuff, huh?  First the Barr memo, which we’ll get to in a moment, and today the redacted search warrant affidavit establishing probable cause to search Mar a Lago.

Let’s get the latter out of the way first.  I read it, and to cut to the chase, not much was revealed.  The Department of Justice wanted to search the former president’s residence in Palm Beach because they suspected that government documents illegally taken from the White House were present there.  The entire section discussing why they had this suspicion was blacked out like the section of the affidavit shown in photo above.

There’s a bunch of stuff in there about the pains taken by the DOJ to get Trump to give up the documents he had taken to Florida and kept in a so-called “storage room” at Mar a Lago, but we’ve read about that already.  There are a couple of hot buzz-words in the unredacted portion of the affidavit, such as “HUMINT,” the word used by the intelligence community to refer to “intelligence information derived from clandestine human sources, commonly referred to as ‘human intelligence,’” in the words of the document itself.  They also get into SCI intelligence, which they define as “classified information concerning or derived from intelligence sources, methods, or analytical processes, which is required to be handled within formal access control systems.”  And something I’ve mentioned without using the technical designation for it, SI, which the affidavit defines as “technical and intelligence information derived from the monitoring of foreign communications signals by other than the intended recipients.”

This is signals intelligence from the National Security Agency which scoops up communications originating in the United States by people not covered by a formal search warrant issued by the FISA court – in other words, stuff that may have been generated either by Trump or people friendly to him that is so sensitive it’s compartmented with this special designation as “SI” that nobody is supposed to see, except perhaps the president during an intelligence briefing, who it seems upon recognizing its sensitivity, removed it to the White House residence and boxed it up and took it with him to Mar a Lago.

In other words, the unredacted search warrant is juicy by inference, and the pundits and experts have been busy all day inferring up a storm, pointing out as best they can what could be covered up by all those black lines, which appear to cover at least half of the affidavit.