we still need a royalty check from this. yeah. okay. we re ready for our royalty check. it s the top of the hour on cnn newsroom, and i m alisyn cam camerota. good to be with you. the fbi s mar-a-lago search. the justice department submitted its proposal under seal for the redacted search warrant affidavit. that s why the doj took the extraordinary step of searching the former president s home. the warrant will privately now move forward. he could release the affidavit with or without redactions or he could not release it at all. evan perez is here with us. when could we see a decision from the judge? reporter: we could see something as soon as today obviously. the judge knows exactly what s in this warrant, in this affidavit. he after all approved the search warrant, and he has said during that hearing last week. he said he believed there were parts of this certainly that could be made public without endangering the justice department s investigation. the other
what more do we know? reporter: it s judicial expediency here. we re going to see by noon tomorrow a version of that affidavit, the narrative that backed up the search warrant of mar-a-lago, everything that would explain the details of the investigation that required fbi to go in and seize all of those boxes of documents from the former president s home. the judge s order says that noon tomorrow is the deadline for the justice department to file this. today the justice department had their own deadline where they were proposing what they wanted to black out in this affidavit to protect their ongoing investigation, and essentially the judge accepted that. he accepted all of their reasonings, and he even outlined what those reasonings were, specifically the justice department wants to protect witnesses, law enforcement agents, uncharged parties, so people who could be under investigation, could face charges in the future. also the strategy, direction,
scope, sources, methods, and finally grand jury information. there s a lot of things that the justice department wants to protect as they have this ongoing criminal investigation into the handling of federal records into the handling of potential national defense information, but this is an important and very quick finding from the judge to release a version of this after fidaffida. we ll have to see tomorrow how blacked out it actually is. katelyn. we have seen the reasons for its redactions, but the judge went on to say they are narrowly tailored and they didn t go overboard with blacking out too much. reporter: i m glad you point that out because narrowly tailored. the justice department did have to show this is why we went
obviously. the judge knows exactly what s in this warrant, in this affidavit. he after all approved the search warrant, and he has said during that hearing last week. he said he believed there were parts of this certainly that could be made public without endangering the justice department s investigation. the other thing is that in the intervening time in just the last few days, we ve learned a lot more about what went into this, and so certainly at a minimum, right, the justice department could be able to tell us about some of the interactions with the trump team that we ve now learned from the archives, released of a letter in the last few days as well, as well as from the trump legal team s own filing in another courtroom. so at a minimum, the judge could release some of that information. when he ll do that, we don t know. all right. so about four months after the former president left office, evan, the national archives asked him to return missing documents. what do we know that
justice department just released this unredacted memo from former general attorney bill barr? what does this reveal? reporter: well, it s a memo from 2019, and the reason why this is even in our hands now is because judges looked at this and said, well, the reason why this memo exists is to give cover for bill barr who never intended to charge the former president with a crime despite the fact that the mueller investigators found plenty of instancen ws where there were obstructive acts and the bottom line is this. despite the theory, and this was produced by the justice department. the obstruction theory would not only be novel, but based on his own analysis, it would also be unusual because volume one of the special counsel s report is conclusive that the evidence developed was not sufficient to charge that any member of the trump campaign, including the president conspired or coordinated with representatives