Judge sides with DOJ, deals blow to Donald Trump

After the DOJ had the FBI carry out a search and seizure warrant at Donald Trump’s home, he spent two weeks focusing on trying to force the release of the search warrant affidavit. It was a blatant attempt on his part at finding out who within his orbit has been secretly cooperating with the Feds against him. That effort predictably failed.

But as is often the case in these types of situations, multiple major media outlets also requested a redacted version of the affidavit, so they could report on it. Generally speaking, the media will always gladly take any information it can get in these situations, without regard for whether it helps or hurts either side. So if this judge had decided to give the media an overly revealing version of the affidavit, this would be a de facto win for Donald Trump, even though he wasn’t the one making this specific request.

This week the judge asked the DOJ to submit a version of the affidavit that it felt was sufficiently redacted so as to protect its ongoing investigation into Trump. Today the judge approved the DOJ’s redactions. This means that when the redacted affidavit is released tomorrow, it’ll include only the precise information that the DOJ is willing to put out there about the case, and nothing that the DOJ is still looking to keep secret.

This would have been a win for Donald Trump if the judge had rejected the DOJ’s proposed redactions and instead ordered the release of a more revealing version of the affidavit. But this ruling is a loss for Trump. The media’s effort to unseal the affidavit was Trump’s last best chance at finding out anything about the DOJ’s case against him that the DOJ doesn’t want him to know – and that affidavit just went down the drain.