An aerial view of former U.S. President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home after Trump said that FBI agents raided it, in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. August 15, 2022.An aerial view of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home after Trump said that FBI agents raided it, in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. August 15, 2022.

NBC News reported that part of the affidavit used to get a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago must be made public.

The Department of Justice requested that the highly sensitive document be kept out of the public eye, because they believed the search of Mar-a-Lago would turn up evidence of illegality.

Jay Bratt, head of a DOJ counterintelligence team, said that the investigation into the records seized from Trump's Palm Beach residence is still in its early stages.

The affidavit contains a lot of information about a case with national security implications, according to the hearing transcript.

He said he believed there were parts of it that could be made public. The government was given a week to file redactions.

The prosecutors had previously urged the court to reject calls from media outlets and other entities to disclose the affidavit.

The search warrant had been approved by the DOJ. One of the criminal statutes that the agents were looking for was the Espionage Act.

The warrant's disclosure was supported by Attorney General Garland who said he personally approved it.

Federal prosecutors wrote in a court filing that the affidavit presented a very different set of considerations.

The prosecutors wrote that the document contains "critically important and detailed investigative facts about witnesses and other highly sensitive information."

The head of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the DOJ's National Security Division stated in the filing that the affidavit would be highly likely to compromise future investigative steps if it was made public.

There is a criminal investigation into the transfer of government records to Mar-a-Lago after Trump left office.

The property receipt and search warrant were released last week. Multiple sets of documents marked top secret and classified were among the items seized by the agents.

Title 18 of the United States Code does not depend on whether the documents in question were classified.