Trump argued that “the District Court’s orders are a sensible preliminary step toward restoring order from chaos, and this Court should therefore deny the Government’s Motion.”
The case is traveling to the 11th Circuit after Trump successfully sued to obtain a special master — i.e. a third party attorney — to review the materials the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago last month, and the focus is now around who can work through about 100 seized records marked as classified first.
The Justice Department is appealing a federal judge’s move to order pause the investigation for the special master review and has asked the appeals court to carve out the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago that were marked as classified.
Prosecutors have argued that pausing the criminal investigation into them poses national security risks. They say that the criminal probe cannot be decoupled from an intelligence community assessment of the documents that US District Judge Aileen Cannon has allowed to proceed. In court filings last week, the Justice Department rejected the idea that Trump could claim that any of those 100 records were his personal records — a claim Trump could make as he tried to keep the materials from investigators’ hands. Additionally, the Justice Department has questioned how Cannon has inserted herself in the dispute in the first place, arguing that the judge did not have the authority to interfere with prosecutors’ review of the documents.
The litigation at the 11th Circuit is playing out as the court-appointed special master, Brooklyn-based senior Judge Raymond Dearie, has begun setting up the process for his review. Later Tuesday, he will hold the status conference with the parties to discuss the process’ next steps. In a letter to Dearie Monday evening, the Trump team signaled resistance to explaining at the start of the review which documents Trump supposedly declassified.
Trump has claimed in media interviews that he declassified the documents from his White House he took back to his Florida home, but his attorneys have stopped well short of making such an assertion in court.
This story is breaking and will be updated.