Merrick Garland weighed search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for weeks

Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over the coming months. The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior Justice Department and FBI officials, the people said. The warrant allowed agents last Monday to seize classified information and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Garland now faces a more momentous decision that will further sharpen an already unprecedented and politically fraught situation: whether to pursue charges against Mr. Trump or any of his allies over their handling of the records at issue and their interactions with Justice Department officials seeking to retrieve them.

A decision to bring charges in the matter against Mr. Trump or any of his allies would thrust the Justice Department deeper into a political environment in which the former president’s supporters and Republican lawmakers are already accusing Mr. Garland and the department of overreach. “If disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” the department wrote in its filing. A judge will ultimately decide but is unlikely to unseal the document given the government’s opposition. Federal agencies also have warned about the prospect of violence against law-enforcement officials in retaliation. A western Pennsylvania man was charged Monday with threatening to “slaughter” Federal Bureau of Investigation agents after the Mar-a-Lago search, with investigators writing in a federal criminal complaint that he wrote social-media posts, including one that said everyone “from the director down to the janitor who cleans their…toilets deserves to die.” Workers recently erected metal barricades around the FBI’s Hoover Building headquarters, a target of some of the threats. The department Monday asked a judge not to make public the affidavit on which the search warrant was based, as some news-media outlets had sought, writing in a court filing that the document contains “critically important investigative facts” about witnesses and tactics.