AP first - its the more important - Garland seeks a judicial order to unseal the warrant due to expressions of unprecedented public interest:
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is asking a federal court to unseal the warrant the FBI used to search the Mar-a-Lago estate of former President Donald Trump, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday, acknowledging extraordinary public interest in the case about classified records.
The request is striking because such documents traditionally remain sealed during a pending investigation. But the Justice Department appeared to recognize that its silence since the search had created a vacuum for bitter verbal attacks by Trump and his allies and Garland wanted to provide the FBI's side for what led to the action.
"The public's clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred under these circumstances weighs heavily in favor of unsealing," said a motion filed in federal court in Florida on Thursday seeking the unsealing.
Should the warrant be released — the request is now with the judge, and Trump can object — it could disclose potentially unflattering information about the former president and his handling of sensitive government documents right as he prepares for another run for the White House. During his successful 2016 campaign, he pointed frequently to an FBI investigation into his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information.
It's unclear at this point how much information would be included in the documents, if made public, or if they would encompass an FBI affidavit that would presumably lay out a detailed factual basis for the search. To obtain a search warrant, federal authorities must prove to a judge that probable cause exists to believe that a crime was committed.
Neither Trump nor the FBI has said anything about what documents the FBI might have recovered. But the former president complained anew on Thursday about the search.
Trump, who for years has lambasted the FBI and sought to sow distrust among his supporters in its decisions, said the warrant was served and the search conducted despite his cooperation with the Justice Department.
There is more for readers wishing to follow the link. That final quoted paragraph is a good point to segue into the NYT item:
Trump was subpoenaed for documents months before FBI searched his home -- The Justice Department had sought the return of classified documents it believed might be at Mar-a-Lago before it sent FBI agents this week to look for them.
By Maggie Haberman , Ben Protess and Glenn Thrush New York Times
August 11, 2022 — 2:27pmFormer President Donald Trump received a subpoena this spring in search of documents that federal investigators believed he had failed to turn over earlier in the year, when he returned boxes of material he had improperly taken with him upon moving out of the White House, three people familiar with the matter said.
The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search of Trump's Florida home Monday by FBI agents seeking classified material they believed might still be there, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to ensure that it had been returned.
The subpoena suggests that the Justice Department tried methods short of a search warrant to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of sending FBI agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago, Trump's home and members-only club.
[...]
"Cooperation" means one thing to Trump, another thing entirely, to everyone else.
Trump could object to Garland's motion to publicly disclose the warrant. Your guess: Expect him to "cooperate" with the motion? Your definition, or his of "cooperate?"
Pop the popcorn.