COURT DELIVERS TRUMP LEGAL BLOW
Judges rule against special master review of documents seized by FBI in search of Florida estate
A federal appeal court ended an independent review of documents seized from former US president Donald Trump’s Florida estate, removing a hurdle the Justice Department said had delayed its criminal investigation into the retention of top-secret government information.
The decision by the threejudge panel represents a significant win for federal prosecutors, clearing the way for them to investigate the entire tranche of documents seized during an August 8 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
It also amounts to a sharp repudiation of arguments by Trump’s lawyers, who for months had said that the former president was entitled to have a so-called special master conduct a neutral review of the thousands of documents taken from the property.
The ruling from the Atlantabased US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit had been expected given the sceptical questions the judges directed at a Trump lawyer during arguments last week, and because two of the three judges on the panel had already ruled in favour of the Justice Department in an earlier dispute over the special master.
The litigation has played out alongside an investigation examining the potential criminal mishandling of national defence information as well as efforts to possibly obstruct that probe.
Attorney General Merrick Garland last month appointed Jack Smith, a veteran public corruption prosecutor, to serve as special counsel overseeing that investigation.
It remains unclear how much longer the investigation will last, or who, if anyone, might be charged. But the probe has shown signs of intensifying, with investigators questioning multiple Trump associates about the documents and granting one key ally immunity to ensure his testimony before a federal grand jury.
And the appeal court decision is likely to speed the investigation along by cutting short the outside review of the records.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung sent a statement describing the appeal court opinion as “purely procedural” and claiming the “decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal, and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago”.
The statement did not indicate whether Trump would continue to press the case in court.
The conflict over the special master began just weeks after the FBI’s search, when Trump sued in federal court in Florida seeking the appointment of an independent arbiter to review the roughly 13,000 documents seized.
A federal judge, Aileen Cannon, granted the Trump team’s request, naming veteran Brooklyn judge Raymond Dearie to serve as special master and tasking him with reviewing the seized records and filtering out from the criminal investigation any documents that might be covered by claims of executive privilege or lawyer-client privilege.
She also barred the Justice Department from using in its criminal investigation any of the seized records, including the roughly 100 with classification markings, until Dearie completed his work.
The department objected to the appointment, saying it was an unnecessary hindrance to its criminal investigation and Trump had no credible basis to invoke either lawyer-client privilege or executive privilege to shield the records from investigators.
It sought, as a first step, to regain access to the classified documents.
A federal appeals panel sided with prosecutors in September, permitting the Justice Department to resume its review of the documents with classification markings.
The department also pressed for access to the much larger trove of unclassified documents, saying such records could contain important evidence for their investigation.