Trump will be indicted, according to the Mar-a-Lago affidavit, which undermines his principal line of defence.

A redacted version of an FBI affidavit, which legal experts said is a damning blow to former President Donald Trump as he is being investigated for his handling of sensitive records, was unsealed by a federal magistrate judge on Friday.

Information about witnesses, sources, and methods, grand jury specifics, and the general scale and breadth of the department's investigation were heavily redacted from the paper.

Even yet, the document offered insightful hints as to why the authorities went to such extreme lengths to carry out a search order at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home earlier this month. It also exposed the extent to which officials attempted less invasive methods to get Trump to turn up official documents that were wrongfully kept at his Florida home.

Former federal prosecutor David Weinstein from the Southern District of Florida told Insider that there was "certainly probable cause to believe that the former president retained classified documents in violation of the applicable statute in a place that was not secure according to the regulations."

He said, "This hurts him more than this helps him."

After reading the affidavit, Norm Eisen, the ethics adviser to former President Barack Obama, stated that "even redacted it is incredibly damning."

He stated that "people are probably going to jail for this behaviour."

Some national security experts went one step farther, criticising the 45th president openly and raising the possibility of the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president.

National security attorney Bradley Moss, a well-known figure in Washington, DC, posted on Twitter, "I have seen enough, folks," "Donald Trump will face charges related to the secret materials. I put my marker down."

The affidavit contains the following important information:

• There were "newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, random print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records, and 'a lot of classified records,'" according to a National Archives review of 15 boxes of government documents that Trump turned over in January.
• According to NARA, "highly classified records were unfoldered, combined with other records, and otherwise improperly [sic] identified" was their "most serious worry."
• There were 184 documents in the boxes, of which 92 were classified as secret, 25 as top-secret, and the remaining 67 as confidential.
• The affidavit stated that "a number of the documents included what appears to be [Trump's] handwritten notes."

The Justice Department stated in a brief that was attached to the affidavit that it is keeping some of the records pertaining to the Mar-a-Lago search confidential in order to protect "a considerable number of civilian witnesses." This is maybe as interesting.

According to wording, "someone inside Trump's past administration or at Mar-a-Lago are supplying material to the FBI," Barbara McQuade, the former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, told Insider.

The brief also stated that there is a higher danger of violence against FBI agents and other law enforcement officials following the Mar-a-Lago search and that the government has probable cause to think "that a statute banning obstruction of justice has been violated."