A federal judge ordered the F.B.I. on Monday to disclose some of the records it has continued to keep secret in its case file on the now-defunct investigation into President Trump’s mishandling of classified materials. That includes any that might touch on the question of whether Mr. Trump destroyed certain documents by flushing them down the toilet during his first term in the White House.
The order by the judge, Beryl A. Howell of Federal District Court in Washington, came in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the bureau by Jason Leopold, a reporter for Bloomberg News.
It remains unclear precisely what sorts of investigative materials the order might make public or if any of them will actually shed new light on allegations that Mr. Trump flushed documents down the toilet. Those allegations were uncovered by Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter, during her research for a book in early 2022.
In his suit against the F.B.I., Mr. Leopold, who has spent years prying documents loose from the government through Freedom of Information Act cases, asked for a wide range of materials. Those included any written records that might provide new details on the kinds of presidential documents that Mr. Trump removed from the White House in early 2021 and took with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.
Some of those documents — many of them highly classified and touching on national security secrets — eventually formed the basis of the criminal charges filed against Mr. Trump in June 2023 by the special counsel Jack Smith. After Mr. Trump was re-elected in November, Mr. Smith was compelled to drop the charges under a binding Justice Department policy that prohibits pursuing criminal prosecutions against sitting presidents.
In her order, Judge Howell cited the fact that the case against Mr. Trump no longer exists as a reason to force the F.B.I. to disclose some of its still-secret investigative records. She also pointed out that many of Mr. Smith’s deputies had lost their jobs in recent days.
“The dedicated public servants,” she wrote, “who worked on and have the deepest knowledge of the facts underlying this investigation, including career federal prosecutors in Special Counsel Smith’s office, have been summarily fired by the new Trump administration.”
Judge Howell also noted how, “somewhat ironically,” the F.B.I.’s attempts to block the release of any materials concerning Mr. Trump’s flushing of government documents ran counter to a landmark Supreme Court ruling this summer. That ruling granted Mr. Trump broad immunity from prosecution on any charges arising from his official acts as president.
The F.B.I. had sought to fight Mr. Leopold’s request by arguing that any records of potential toilet-flushing in its possession were sensitive because they might at some point undergird another law enforcement investigation into Mr. Trump. Judge Howell, however, reminded the bureau that there could be no such investigation because even if Mr. Trump did put documents in a toilet during his term, he could not face criminal charges for having done so.
Indeed, she wrote, the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling had left Freedom of Information Act suits like Mr. Leopold’s “as a critical tool for the American public to keep apprised of a president’s conduct, accomplishing” the law’s goal of allowing “the citizenry to ‘know what its government is up to.’”
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