Attorney-general Merrick B. Garland moved on Thursday to make public the legal authorisation for the FBI’s search of former President Donald J. 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 programmes run by the US.

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 programmes,” a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the US 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.

Late on Thursday night, 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. In a clipped, two-minute statement to reporters at the justice department’s headquarters, Garland said he decided to break his silence and 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”. But Garland also used the brief appearance to defend, at least implicitly, the justice department’s handling of the case against the torrent of criticism directed at it by Trump and his allies.

“Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favour,” Garland said. “Under my watch that is precisely what the justice department is doing.”

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 on Monday.

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.

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 3pm on Friday whether Trump opposed the motion.

Garland’s statement amounted to a challenge to Trump, who has been free to release the search warrant and the list of items taken during the search on his own but has declined to do so.

The justice department did not seek to release the affidavits — which contain much more information about the behaviour of Trump and evidence presented by others — that were used to obtain the warrant.

The public statement by Garland came at an extraordinary moment, as a sprawling set of investigations into the former President on multiple fronts gained momentum even as Trump continued to signal that he might soon announce another run for the White House.

Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on Wednesday in a civil investigation into his business practices by the New York attorney general, and a close ally in the House had his phone seized by federal agents this week in one strand of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to remain in power despite his election loss in 2020.

During his appearance on Thursday, Garland, a former mid-level prosecutor, went out of his way to counter claims by Trump and his supporters that agents with the bureau or justice department lawyers were motivated by politics.

New York Times News Service