The Justice Department¡¯s search of former President Donald Trump¡¯s Florida home was spurred by the discovery that he had held onto a trove of highly classified material that included documents related to the use of ¡°clandestine human sources¡± in intelligence gathering, according to a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant.

The portions of the affidavit made public Friday describe the Justice Department¡¯s monthslong push to recover sensitive materials taken from the White House by a former president who viewed state documents as his private property and now faces a department investigating the possibility he illegally obstructed those efforts.

The partial release of the 38-page affidavit was the latest in a remarkable succession of developments in the inquiry into how hundreds of pages of documents with classified markings ended up at Trump¡¯s Mar-a-Lago residence after he left the White House, in apparent violation of the law requiring all presidential materials to be turned over to the National Archives.