Category: News

The actress Anne Heche remained in a coma and was not expected to survive the injuries she sustained in a car crash last week, according to a statement that her publicist released Thursday night on behalf of her family and friends.

Ms. Heche, 53, was critically injured on Aug. 5 when the Mini Cooper she was driving crashed into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, the authorities said. She suffered a severe anoxic brain injury and was being treated at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital, the family statement said.

“It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,” the statement said.

The crash started a fire that took 59 firefighters more than an hour to extinguish, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Ms. Heche was the only person in the car, the authorities said.

In 1991, Ms. Heche won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding younger actress in a drama series, for playing good and evil twins on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”

She starred in several popular Hollywood films in the late 1990s, including “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog” and “Six Days Seven Nights.” She continued to have television roles, including on “Men in Trees” in 2006 and “Hung” in 2009, and performed on Broadway, starring in “Proof” in 2002 and “Twentieth Century” in 2004, for which she received a Tony nomination.

In his review of “Twentieth Century, Ben Brantley of The Times wrote of Ms. Heche’s portrayal of Lily Garland, “Her posture melting between serpentine seductiveness and a street fighter’s aggressiveness, her voice shifting between supper-club velvet and dime store vinyl, Ms. Heche summons an entire gallery of studio-made sirens from the Depression era: Jean Harlow, the pre-mummified Joan Crawford and, yes, Carole Lombard, who famously portrayed Lily in Howard Hawks’s screen version of ‘Twentieth Century.’”‘

She has several projects that are in postproduction, according to IMDb, including “Supercell,” a movie with Alec Baldwin, and the HBO show “The Idol.” She had recently finished filming on “Girl in Room 13,” a Lifetime movie that is scheduled to premiere in September, Variety reported.

Mike Ives contributed reporting from Seoul.

ATHENS — In a tense and highly confidential meeting in the senate chamber of the Greek Parliament, the prime minister’s smooth, handpicked spy chief politely evaded the questions of opposition lawmakers. They were demanding to know if he had surveilled a rival politician and a financial journalist investigating powerful business interests close to the prime minister.

But the inquiries mostly went nowhere. The committee’s chair, a political ally of the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, discouraged follow-up questions, kept time to a minimum and ensured that the July 29 meeting, the content of which is still protected, was a dud.

But less than a week later, the charges of government spying detonated into a sprawling scandal that is now shaking the very top of the Greek government, raising fears of widespread surveillance throughout Europe, and potentially putting another crack in Europe’s united front against Russian for its war in Ukraine.

Greece today is awash in talk of blackmail, Watergate and a secret police state that uses a pervasive, legal surveillance program with more than 15,000 orders last year alone to start, extend or cut off wiretaps in this country of 10.5 million people. Predator, a malicious spyware used to penetrate cellphones, has become part of the Greek vocabulary.

Mr. Mitsotakis, a conservative who took personal control of the intelligence portfolio in 2019 and whose own father was weakened by accusations of political espionage when he himself served as prime minister some 30 years ago, is in full damage-control mode.

He fired his loyal spy chief, Panagiotis Kontoleon, accepted the resignation of the government’s general secretary, Grigoris Dimitriadis — who is also his nephew — and gave a nationally televised address this week full of denials and proposals for reforming the spy agency, including adding a layer of judicial scrutiny to what many critics have called an in-house rubber stamp before wiretap authorization.

“I didn’t know about it and obviously I would never have permitted,” it, Mr. Mitsotakis said of the spying on his political rival, though the country’s intelligence agency comes under his oversight.

There is growing concern that Europe, so proud of its privacy protections and rule of law, is rampant with listening devices and espionage at a moment when its democracies are being threatened by Russian aggression. So much so, the European Union is regularly checking devices.

Investigations into spyware should now “involve a check of the phones of all politicians and top level officials,” Sophie in ’t Veld, the chairwoman of the European Parliament’s special committee on spyware, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “To get a full picture of the spying activity by governments.”

Greece has now vaulted to the top of the worry list. Allies of Mr. Mitsotakis, a staunch defender of Ukraine, have argued that the scandal is not just a threat to Greek stability, but to the common cause against Russia.

“If I were Mr. Putin, I would be very happy if the governments that were so opposed to Russia would fall, ” said Adonis Georgiadis, a government minister and the vice president of Mr. Mitsotakis’ New Democracy party. While he stressed he was not blaming Russia for the hacking, he added that Russia had exerted influence in Greece before, “So if they did it in the past. Why not do it now?”

Turkey, too, he said, “could be” behind it all.

Mr. Mitsotakis, in his speech, also talked cryptically of the possibility of “shady forces outside Greece” working “to destabilize the country.”

Opponents say the government’s insinuations amount to a desperate smoke screen to avoid the obvious issue — that it had gotten caught spying on its own citizens and political rivals.

“It was obvious that the government was lying,” said George Katrougalos, the former Greek foreign minister of the main opposition Syriza party, who attended the confidential meeting on July 29, the substance of which he said he could not divulge. Opposition party officials have interpreted the nondenials of the intelligence chief about spying on journalists, and even on a 12-year-old migrant child, as confirmations that they had done so. And they have seized on the revelations of “legal” spying to cast doubt on the government’s categorical denials of being behind the Predator hacks.

The extent of the state’s surveillance might never have come to light had Nikos Androulakis, leader of Greece’s third-largest political party, the center-left Pasok-Kinal, not upgraded to a new iPhone.

In June, an aide suggested that he give his old phone to the new spyware-detecting lab in Brussels at the European Parliament, where he is also member. Technicians found he was the target of a cyberattack on Sept. 21, 2021, with the malware Predator, which is manufactured by Cytrox, a technology company that operates from Greece, and if installed through a phishing scam, can take over an entire cellphone.

“It can watch, it can record,” said Dimitrios Mantzos, the Pasok party spokesman, who said that the culprit had “to be domestic” because Greek fingerprints were all over the place. “It’s too Greek for us to understand, but it’s all Greek.”

The party leader was not the only target.

Thanasis Koukakis, an investigative reporter who had broken news in 2019 about Greece’s major banks, noticed problems with his new iPhone in June 2020. He asked a source if it was possible he was under surveillance.

The source told him he was. He said he was shown transcripts of his conversations, including one as he waited for his daughter in front of her school, complete with notes describing garbled phrases.

He complained to the country’s communication and privacy watchdog. Before he could get an answer, the government amended a law in March 2021, allowing it to withhold information from people being investigated on questions of national security. The privacy watchdog told him that it had no information about his phone.

Later, an investigation by Reporters United, which included state intelligence documents and the prosecutor’s orders, showed that the state surveillance was ended the same day he filed his complaint.

It also turned out that Mr. Koukakis’ phone was infected with Predator, which he discovered only in March of this year, after Citizen Lab, the world’s foremost experts on spyware tested his device. The government denied having anything to do with it.

Only on Wednesday, did he finally receive a call from a prosecutor from the country’s highest court to set up an appointment about his complaint.

“The revelation of Androulakis’ case is a blessing for me,” said Mr. Koukakis, who is convinced Mr. Mitsotakis knew everything about the surveillance in the current scandal.

Mr. Androulakis, too, filed legal complaints and petitioned Greece’s watchdog to look into the breach of his privacy.

In his case, the watchdog agency was able to confirm with Mr. Androulakis’s telephone service provider in early August that the intelligence agency had tapped his phone.

Giorgos Gerapetritis, one of Mr. Mitsotakis’ closest aides, said he then tried to set up a meeting between Mr. Androulakis and the intelligence chief, so that the top spy could explain to him and him alone, as was permitted under the law, why he was under surveillance.

But he said he never heard back.

Instead, Mr. Androulakis says he wants the matter handled by the judiciary and aired before Parliament’s ethics committee and Greece’s privacy watchdog.

The whole affair has set off a political upheaval in Greece, with parliamentary elections approaching by next summer.

Mr. Georgiadis acknowledged that any evidence of Mr. Mitsotakis having known about the surveillance would be “very bad. But he didn’t know.” He put the blame on what he called the “political screw up” of the fired spy chief, but also warned that the scandal could open the door to an opposition more favorable to Russia.

But Mr. Androulakis, like many Greeks, is convinced the enemy is within.

“I never expected the Greek government to put me under surveillance,” he has said, “using the darkest practices.”

By the end of today, Congress will likely have passed the biggest climate bill in U.S. history.

This newsletter has already covered the bill’s main goals and the back story of how it came together. Today, I want to get more detailed and explain how it will help people and businesses abandon the dirty energy that contributes to global warming.

What’s in the bill

The bill’s climate provisions are mostly a collection of subsidies for energy that does not emit any carbon, like solar, wind and nuclear power. Without those subsidies, polluting fossil fuels are often still cheaper. The subsidies try to give cleaner energy an edge.

“I don’t mean this as an exaggeration: This really changes everything,” said Jesse Jenkins, a climate policy expert at Princeton University. “It is effectively going to shift the financial case away from dirty energy toward clean energy for everyone.”

For consumers, the subsidies will reduce the prices of electric vehicles, solar panels, heat pumps and other energy-efficient home improvements. You can claim the subsidies through tax filings; as a separate rebate if you don’t file taxes; or, in some cases, immediately when you make a purchase.

Let’s say you want to buy one of the cheaper, new electric vehicles on the market right now, priced around $40,000. To get the subsidy, you will first want to make sure the car qualifies; the bill requires, among other things, that the vehicles are assembled in North America. (Ask the car dealer or manufacturer to find out.) Then, make sure that you qualify; individual tax filers cannot make more than $150,000 a year, for example. And, given high demand, you might have to order a car well in advance.

If you meet the requirements, you can claim up to $7,500 in tax credits — effectively bringing the price of a $40,000 vehicle to $32,500.

That is the tax credit for new cars. For used cars, there will be a smaller tax credit of up to $4,000. The goal of both credits is to even the playing field: Cars that burn fossil fuels are still generally cheaper than electric vehicles. With the credits, electric cars will be much closer in price to, if not cheaper than, similar nonelectric vehicles.

For home improvements, the process will be different, but the basic idea is similar. For a typical $20,000 rooftop solar installation, tax credits will cut the price by up to $6,000. There are also subsidies for heat pumps, electric stoves and other energy-efficiency projects. The hope is to make all these changes much more affordable for everyday Americans, leading to less reliance on fossil fuels and expanding the market for cleaner energy.

‘A good deal’

The bill includes a slew of benefits for businesses, too. For example, they will be able to claim credits to replace traditional cars with electric ones, saving as much as 30 percent on each vehicle’s cost.

Another set of incentives will encourage businesses to build and use cleaner energy. Similar credits have existed in the past, but they often expired after one or two years — producing unpredictable boom-and-bust cycles for investors and businesses. This time, Congress is establishing the credits for at least a decade, helping create more certainty. And the credits will for the first time apply to publicly owned utilities and nonprofits, a large segment of U.S. electricity providers.

The bill does include a compromise: It requires more leasing of federal lands and waters for oil and gas projects. Senator Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, demanded this provision.

But experts say that it will have only a modest impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Overall, the bill will subtract at least 24 tons of carbon emissions for each ton of emissions that the oil and gas provision adds, according to Energy Innovation, a think tank.

“It’s a trade-off,” my colleague Coral Davenport, who covers energy and environmental policy, told me. “But in terms of emissions impact, it’s a good deal.”

The bottom line

The bill will make cleaner energy and electric vehicles much cheaper for many Americans. Over time, it will also likely make them more affordable for the rest of the world, as more competition and innovation in the U.S. lead to cheaper, better products that can be shipped worldwide.

And it will move America close to President Biden’s goal of cutting greenhouse emissions to half their peak by 2030, according to three independent analyses.

The bill is also a sign that the U.S. is starting to take climate change seriously. That will give American diplomats more credibility as they ask other countries, such as China and India, to do the same.

Still, many scientists believe the U.S. will eventually need to do more to prevent severe damage from climate change. “This bill is really only the beginning,” said Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

For more

THE LATEST NEWS

Trump Investigation

A beef within an athletic department: Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari wants a flashy new practice facility. And he wants it ASAP — because he works at a “basketball school.” Kentucky football coach Mark Stoops would beg to differ. A classic S.E.C. squabble.

The power of hugs

A common motif in Japanese animation is the hug — two characters collide in an embrace, often while falling through the air. An essay from the Times critic Maya Phillips explains how hugs became such an important part of the art form.

Anime is characterized by exaggeration, in its characters, design and action, but it tends to be coy in its depictions of romance. The dramatic hug satisfies both criteria, she writes: “An embrace between lovers or family or friends is an expression of intimacy that anime can magnify.”

Read the essay, which visualizes many of anime’s iconic hugs.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Thursday called former President Donald J. Trump’s bluff.

Ever since the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Mr. Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, Mr. Trump and his supporters have been portraying the search as baseless and politically motivated.

The investigation centers on whether Mr. Trump improperly took sensitive materials with him from the White House and then failed to return all of them — including classified documents — when the National Archives and the Justice Department demanded that he do so.

But Mr. Trump has chosen to keep secret the warrant and the list of what the F.B.I. took from his Mar-a-Lago club and estate — documents that very likely lay out what law or laws investigators believe may have been broken, what evidence supporting that belief they thought they would find there and what they seized.

Mr. Garland and the investigators working on the case had made no public comments after the search, which allowed Mr. Trump and his supporters to make ever more elaborate claims of official wrongdoing and abuse of power.

But on Thursday, Mr. Garland broke his silence.

Speaking from a podium at the Justice Department, the attorney general said he had personally approved the request for a search warrant. He denounced the “unfounded attacks on the professionalism” and integrity of the F.B.I. and prosecutors.

And — most importantly — he announced that the Justice Department had filed a motion to unseal the warrant used in the search, as well as the inventory of what the F.B.I. took away, so that the government could make them public.

In so doing, the attorney general alluded to the fact that Mr. Trump was free to release the documents himself, but has chosen not to do so. “Copies of both the warrant and the F.B.I. property receipt were provided on the day of the search to the former president’s counsel, who was on site during the search,” Mr. Garland said.

Moving quickly, a federal magistrate judge — Bruce E. Reinhart, who has also come under attack by Trump supporters — set a deadline of 3 p.m. on Friday for the department to relay any objection from Mr. Trump about unsealing the documents. In his brief remarks, Mr. Garland said he decided to make a public statement because Mr. Trump had confirmed the action and because of the “substantial public interest in this matter.”

If Mr. Trump acquiesces, the public will have more information about the basis for the search — information that could rebut the former president’s claims that the Justice Department acted without cause. If Mr. Trump fights the disclosure, however, he risks looking as though he has something to hide.

Either way, there is another important caveat. Mr. Garland did not propose unsealing the department’s application for the search warrant and any accompanying affidavit from a criminal investigator explaining why there was probable cause to believe the search would uncover evidence of a crime.

Those materials would lay out in starker detail not just what criminal investigators think they know — for example, whether they believed Mr. Trump was illegally hoarding government documents, whether some of those files were classified and where at Mar-a-Lago they were being stored — but how the investigators knew those things.

In short, the application would make clear whether the Justice Department is talking to one or more confidential sources in the Trump camp who are providing information.

It is not surprising that the Justice Department is not proposing unsealing that particularly sensitive material because it would be careful to protect its sources. But at the same time, that is what Mr. Trump’s supporters are most eager to learn.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is a close Trump ally, released a statement on Thursday afternoon saying that he wanted to know the basis for the search — alluding to “the deep mistrust of the F.B.I. and D.O.J.” among the former president’s supporters.

Mr. Graham noted that in the Russia investigation, surveillance warrants obtained against an adviser to Mr. Trump were later deemed unjustified. The F.B.I. failed to tell the court about evidence that undercut its claim the adviser was most likely a Russian agent, according to an inspector general report.

“What I am looking for is the predicate for the search,” Mr. Graham said. “Was the information provided to the judge sufficient and necessary to authorize a raid on the former president’s home within 90 days of the midterm election? I am urging, actually insisting, the D.O.J. and the F.B.I. lay their cards on the table as to why this course of action was necessary. Until that is done the suspicion will continue to mount.”

By that standard, Mr. Graham and other Trump allies are unlikely to be satisfied with the documents that Mr. Garland is proposing to make public. The underlying application may be unsealed and become public someday — but that typically happens after an indictment, such as when a defendant files a motion to suppress evidence gathered in a search by arguing that it lacked a sufficient legal basis.

Still, even the documents the Justice Department wants to make public could shed significant light on why investigators carried out the search — documents that, for some reason, Mr. Trump has so far seen as in his interest to keep secret.

“Federal law, longstanding department rules, and our ethical obligations prevent me from providing further details as to the basis of the search at this time,” Mr. Garland said, adding: “This is all I can say right now. More information will be made available in the appropriate way and at the appropriate time.”

Why is Donald Trump so powerful? How did he come to dominate one of the two major parties and get himself elected president? Is it his hair? His waistline? No, it’s his narratives. Trump tells powerful stories that ring true to tens of millions of Americans.

The main one is that America is being ruined by corrupt coastal elites. According to this narrative, there is an interlocking network of highly educated Americans who make up what the Trumpians have come to call the Regime: Washington power players, liberal media, big foundations, elite universities, woke corporations. These people are corrupt, condescending and immoral and are looking out only for themselves. They are out to get Trump because Trump is the person who stands up to them. They are not only out to get Trump; they are out to get you.

This narrative has a core of truth to it. Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class. But the Trumpian propaganda turns what is an unfortunate social chasm into venomous conspiracy theory. It simply assumes, against a lot of evidence, that the leading institutions of society are inherently corrupt, malevolent and partisan and are acting in bad faith.

It simply assumes that the proof of people’s virtue is that they’re getting attacked by the Regime. Trump’s political career has been kept afloat by elite scorn. The more elites scorn him, the more Republicans love him. The key criterion for leadership in the Republican Party today is having the right enemies.

Into this situation walks the F.B.I. There’s a lot we don’t know about the search at Mar-a-Lago. But we do know how the Republican Party reacted. The right side of my Twitter feed was ecstatic. See! We really are persecuted! Essays began to appear with titles like “The Regime Wants Its Revenge.” Ron DeSantis tweeted, “The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” As usual, the tone was apocalyptic. “This is the worst attack on this Republic in modern history,” the Fox News host Mark Levin exclaimed.

The investigation into Trump was seen purely as a heinous Regime plot. At least for now, the search has shaken the Republican political landscape. Several weeks ago, about half of Republican voters were ready to move on from Trump, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. This week the entire party seemed to rally behind him. Republican strategists advising Trump’s potential primary opponents had reason to be despondent. “Completely handed him a lifeline,” one such strategist told Politico. “Unbelievable … It put everybody in the wagon for Trump again. It’s just taken the wind out of everybody’s sails.”

According to a Trafalgar Group/Convention of States Action survey, 83 percent of likely Republican voters said the F.B.I. search made them more motivated to vote in the 2022 elections. Over 75 percent of likely Republican voters believed Trump’s political enemies were behind the search rather than the impartial justice system, as did 48 percent of likely general election voters overall.

In a normal society, when politicians get investigated or charged, it hurts them politically. But that no longer applies to the G.O.P. The judicial system may be colliding with the political system in an unprecedented way.

What happens if a prosecutor charges Trump and he is convicted just as he is cruising to the G.O.P. nomination or maybe even the presidency? What happens if the legal system, using its criteria, decides Trump should go to prison at the very moment that the electoral system, using its criteria, decides he should go to the White House?

I presume in those circumstances Trump would be arrested and imprisoned. I also presume we would see widespread political violence from incensed Trump voters who would conclude that the Regime has stolen the country. In my view, this is the most likely path to a complete democratic breakdown.

In theory, justice is blind, and obviously no person can be above the law. But as Damon Linker wrote in a Substack post, “This is a polity, not a graduate seminar in Kantian ethics.” We live in a specific real-world situation, and we all have to take responsibility for the real-world effects of our actions.

America absolutely needs to punish those who commit crimes. On the other hand, America absolutely needs to make sure that Trump does not get another term as president. What do we do if the former makes the latter more likely? I have no clue how to get out of this potential conflict between our legal and political realities.

We’re living in a crisis of legitimacy, during which distrust of established power is so virulent that actions by elite actors tend to backfire, no matter how well founded they are.

My impression is that the F.B.I. had legitimate reasons to do what it did. My guess is it will find some damning documents that will do nothing to weaken Trump’s support. I’m also convinced that, at least for now, it has unintentionally improved Trump’s re-election chances. It has unintentionally made life harder for Trump’s potential primary challengers and motivated his base.

It feels as though we’re walking toward some sort of storm and there’s no honorable way to alter our course.

Monkeys are not to blame for the monkeypox outbreak that has triggered health alerts, including a national health emergency in the United States, as the viral disease has continued to spread, the World Health Organization said this week after reports of attacks against the animals in Brazil.

At least 10 monkeys were rescued last week in São José do Rio Preto in the Brazilian state of São Paulo after the authorities found signs they had been attacked or poisoned, out of fear of monkeypox transmission, according to the G1 news site in that country. Seven of the monkeys later died.

The police in São Paulo are investigating those cases and said the mistreatment of animals could be punishable by three months to one year in jail.

Despite the name, the risk of monkeypox transmission during this outbreak is centered on humans, not animals, Margaret Harris, a W.H.O. spokeswoman, said during a Tuesday news conference.

“What people need to know very clearly is the transmission we are seeing is happening between humans to humans,” she said. “It’s close-contact transmission. The concern should be about where it’s transmitting in the human population and what humans can do to protect themselves from getting it and transmitting it. They should certainly not be attacking any animals.”

The statement was prompted by a question at the news conference in Geneva about the recent monkey attacks in Brazil.

The virus was named after it was originally found in a group of laboratory monkeys in 1958 in Denmark, but rodents are thought to be the primary animal hosts for the virus, Ms. Harris said.

Some scientists and public health officials have called for a new name for the disease, citing racist overtones and stigmatization, but no official change has been announced. They say the current name could have “potentially devastating and stigmatizing effects” or erroneously link the virus solely to the African continent, when it is now an international crisis.

The W.H.O. is having ongoing conversations on what should be the right name for the virus, Ms. Harris said. She said an announcement would be coming soon.

“Any stigmatization of any person infected is going to increase the transmission,” Ms. Harris said. “Because if people are afraid of identifying themselves as being infected, then they will not get care and they will not take precautions and we will see more transmission.”

The monkeypox virus is primarily found in Central and West Africa, particularly in areas close to tropical rainforests — and rope squirrels, tree squirrels, Gambian pouched rats and dormice have all been identified as potential carriers.

People who get sick commonly experience a fever, headache, back and muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, and exhaustion. A rash that looks like pimples or blisters is also common. Transmission occurs with close physical contact and most commonly spreads once symptoms have appeared, about six to 13 days after exposure. A majority of cases this year have been in young men, many of whom self-identify as men who have sex with men.

The United States declared a national health emergency this month over the monkeypox outbreak, with more than 10,000 confirmed cases nationwide according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The W.H.O. activated its highest level of alert for monkeypox in July, with the number of international confirmed cases rising to more than 31,000 so far.

Two vaccines originally developed for smallpox can help prevent monkeypox infections, with Jynneos considered the safer choice. Supplies in the United States, however, have been limited. People can be vaccinated after exposure to the virus to prevent the development of the disease.

Juliana Barbassa contributed translation.

Former President Donald J. 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 Mr. Trump’s Florida home on Monday by F.B.I. 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 F.B.I. agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and members-only club.

Two people briefed on the classified documents that investigators believe remained at Mar-a-Lago indicated that they were so sensitive in nature, and related to national security, that the Justice Department had to act.

The subpoena was first disclosed by John Solomon, a conservative journalist who has also been designated by Mr. Trump as one of his representatives to the National Archives.

The existence of the subpoena is being used by allies of Mr. Trump to make a case that the former president and his team were cooperating with the Justice Department in identifying and returning the documents in question and that the search was unjustified.

The Justice Department declined to comment. Christina Bobb, a lawyer working for Mr. Trump, did not respond to messages. It is not clear what precise materials the subpoena sought or what documents the former president might have provided in response.

The subpoena factored into a visit that Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, made with a small group of other federal officials to Mar-a-Lago weeks later, in early June, one of the people said.

The officials met with Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran. Mr. Trump, who likes to play host and has a long history of trying to charm officials inquiring about his practices, also made an appearance. During the visit, the officials examined a basement storage area where the former president had stowed material that had come with him from the White House.

A few days after the visit, Mr. Bratt emailed Mr. Corcoran and told him to further secure the remaining documents, which were kept in the storage area with a stronger padlock, one of the people said. The email was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

Then, they subpoenaed surveillance footage from the club, which could have given officials a glimpse of who was coming in and out of the storage area, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. They received footage specifically from areas of the club where they believed the documents might have been stored, the person said.

During the same period, investigators were in contact with a number of Mr. Trump’s aides who had some visibility into how he stored and moved documents around the White House and who still worked for him, three people familiar with the events said.

Among those whom investigators reached out to was Molly Michael, Mr. Trump’s assistant in the outer Oval Office who also went to work for him at Mar-a-Lago, three people familiar with the outreach said.

Investigators have also reached out to Derek Lyons, the former White House staff secretary, whose last day was Dec. 18, 2020, and no longer works for Mr. Trump, with questions about the process for handling documents, according to a person familiar with the outreach.

Federal officials came to believe that Mr. Trump had not relinquished all the material that left the White House with him at the end of his term, according to three people familiar with the investigation.

Less than two months later, about two dozen F.B.I. agents, intentionally not wearing the blue wind breakers emblazoned with the agency’s logo usually worn during searches, appeared at Mar-a-Lago with a warrant.

The club was closed; Mr. Trump was in the New York area; the F.B.I. startled a crew fixing a large fountain, a maid who was dusting and a handful of Secret Service agents who guard the complex.

The search warrant was broad, allowing the agents to investigate all areas of the club where classified materials might have been stored. They went through the basement, Mr. Trump’s office and at least part of his residence at the club.

After hours of searching, they left with several boxes that were not filled to the brim and in at least some cases simply contained sealed envelopes of material that the agents took and were otherwise empty, one person familiar with the search said.

The person said that the F.B.I. left behind a manifest of what was taken, which was two pages long.

Mr. Trump’s team has declined to disclose the contents of the search warrant. A number of organizations, including The New York Times, are seeking in federal court to have it unsealed.

Some senior Republicans have been warned by allies of Mr. Trump not to continue to be aggressive in criticizing the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the matter because it is possible that more damaging information about Mr. Trump related to the search will eventually become public.

When Mr. Trump left the White House after refusing to concede that he had lost the 2020 election and seeking frantically to stay in power, a number of boxes of material made their way from the West Wing to Florida.

In the boxes was a mash of papers, along with items like a raincoat and golf balls, according to people briefed on the contents. The National Archives tried for months after Mr. Trump left office to retrieve the material, engaging in lengthy discussions with representatives for the former president to acquire material that should have been properly stored by the archives under the Presidential Records Act.

When archivists recovered 15 boxes of material this year, they discovered several pages of classified material and referred the matter to the Justice Department. But officials later came to believe that additional classified material remained at Mar-a-Lago.

Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have maintained that they were trying all along to cooperate with federal officials and had kept an open line of communication.

But others familiar with federal officials’ efforts to recover the documents have painted a very different picture. They have said that Mr. Trump resisted returning property that belonged to the government, despite being told that he needed to.

Some of Mr. Trump’s informal advisers outside his direct employee have insisted to him that he can claim the documents are personal items and keep them there.