By Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Merrick Garland moved Thursday (11) to make public the legal authorization for the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, which was carried out as part of the government’s effort to account for documents that one person briefed on the matter said related to some of the most highly classified programs run by the United States.

Garland said he had personally approved the search after the failure of “less intrusive” attempts to retrieve material taken from the White House by Trump.

Garland provided no details. But the person briefed on the matter said investigators had been concerned about material from what the government calls “special access programs”,  a designation even more classified than “top secret” that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities.

Government officials have expressed concern that allowing highly classified materials to remain at Trump’s home could leave them vulnerable to efforts by foreign adversaries to acquire them, according to another person familiar with the Justice Department’s thinking.

In a statement to reporters at the Justice Department, Garland said he decided to make a public statement because Trump had disclosed the action himself. The attorney general also cited the “surrounding circumstances” of the case and the “substantial public interest in this matter.”

Minutes before Garland took the podium, a top official in the Justice Department’s national security division filed a motion to unseal the search warrant and an inventory of items retrieved in the search Monday (8).

While the inventory provided to Trump’s team after the search is unlikely to reveal details about the specific documents he kept, it refers to an array of sensitive material, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Late Thursday, Trump said he would not oppose the motion to release the warrant and the inventory. He wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that he was “encouraging” their release. “Release the documents now!” he said.

Judge Bruce Reinhart, the federal magistrate in the Southern District of Florida who approved the search warrant and is handling the motion to unseal it, had issued an order requiring the Justice Department to serve a copy of its motion to Trump’s lawyers. It said the department would have to tell the judge by 3 p.m. Friday (12) whether Trump opposed the motion.

-New York Times