A federal judge in Florida on Thursday said he was “inclined” not to seal the whole search warrant affidavit that justified the search of former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, and he told the Justice Department to submit a copy of the affidavit with proposed redactions for the information it wants to keep secret.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart — the judge who authorized the warrant and presided over Thursday's hearing on the affidavit – said the government should submit that proposed version by next Thursday. Reinhart said he would review it and may meet lawyers for the government and give them a chance to make an argument for why specific information should be withheld.

The decision was made during a court hearing in West Palm Beach, after several news organizations, including The Associated Press, asked a federal judge to make public the affidavit supporting the warrant that allowed FBI agents to search Trump’s Florida estate.

In addition to ordering the redactions, the judge agreed to make public other documents, including the warrant’s cover sheet, the Justice Department’s motion to seal the documents and the judge’s order requiring them to be sealed.

Those documents showed the FBI was specifically investigating the “willful retention of national defense information,” the concealment or removal of government records and obstruction of a federal investigation.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Trump illegally stored classified records at Mar-a-Lago – and potentially violated the Espionage Act – is still “in its early stages,” a top national security prosecutor said Thursday.

The revelation by Jay Bratt, a top national security prosecutor, was the clearest indication yet that the Justice Department is directly scrutinizing Trump’s conduct and is moving forward in its criminal investigation after the FBI seized classified and top secret information during the search last week.

The government contends that releasing the information would compromise its investigation.

Unsealing the affidavit would provide a “road map” of the investigation — which is in its “early stages” — and would expose the next steps to be taken by federal agents and prosecutors, said Bratt, the chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section.

He argued it was in the public interest for the investigation, including interviews of witnesses, to go forward unhindered.

"I feel good about today's hearing," said Deanna Shullman, one of the attorneys representing media organizations in the case, after it concluded Thursday.

"Judge Reinhart seems to have a very good sense that it is his job, as the gatekeeper in this case, to perform his function of balancing the interests in the public of accessing these materials, against the interest in the government and keeping them secret."

David Weinstein, a former assistant U.S. Attorney, told Spectrum News that the search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate was "unprecedented."

"The fact that we're now looking at within a two week time period, a search warrant that was filed under seal along with an affidavit and that we've already seen the warrant itself is unprecedented," Weinstein said.

Weinstein said it would be unusual for the Justice Department to make the affidavit public in a case where no criminal charges have been filed.

"Transparency and having everybody aware of all the fact  will keep anybody from speculating why the search was conducted, what evidence they had to believe that these documents or anything else were located at Mar a Lago, but you have to let the system itself proceed," Weinstein said.

"These allegations as to it being a witch hunt ... is just causing more strife and more accusations to be made and, quite frankly, drawing some danger to law enforcement," he added.

As the hearing kicked off, a small caravan of vehicles with Trump flags drove past the federal courthouse. An attorney for Trump, Christina Bobb, was in the courthouse on Thursday but said she was only there to observe the court proceeding.

The media companies argue the affidavit's release would help the public determine if the Justice Department had legitimate reasons for the search or if it was part of a Biden administration vendetta against Trump, as the former president and his backers contend. Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, called for the release of the unredacted affidavit in the interest of transparency.

“The matter is one of utmost public interest, involving the actions of current and former government officials,” wrote attorney Carol Jean LoCiero, who is representing The New York Times and others. “President Trump decried the the search as an ‘assault that could only take place in Third World Countries,’ asserted agents ‘even broke into my safe,’ and otherwise challenged the validity of the search.”

FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, removing 11 sets of classified documents, with some not only marked top secret but also “sensitive compartmented information," according to a receipt of what was taken that was released Friday. That is a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets that if revealed publicly could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to U.S. interests. The court records did not provide specific details about information the documents might contain.