Trump petitions the U.S. Supreme Court to review the seizure of sensitive documents.
This case has been allowed by the court. Therefore The FBI inquiry into whether or not Donald Trump preserved any White House records after he left office led to a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump urged the Supreme Court to get involved in his dispute with the Justice Dept over confidential materials confiscated from his Florida residence during a criminal probe into his management of government data.
Mr. Trump issued an emergency petition seeking the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court judgment that would have prohibited an impartial arbitrator, known as a special master, appointed by Mr. Trump from reviewing more than 100 secret papers among 11,000 data taken by FBI agents on August 8 from the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.
On September 21, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta overturned a ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who’d already temporarily suspended the department from analyzing the confiscated secret papers until the special master had weeded out those that may be considered privileged and concealed from investigators.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledging the need to protect secret material, barred special master Judge Raymond Dearie from seeing any papers that bore such marks. In their submission on Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s attorneys said that Mr. Dearie should be allowed to “judge whether papers bearing classification marks are classified, and irrespective of classification, whether such records are previous records or presidential records.”
Mr. Trump’s legal team also said that the Justice Department “attempted to criminalize a document management disagreement and is now fiercely opposed to a public procedure that offers much-needed supervision.”
In connection with an FBI investigation into whether or not Mr. Trump unlawfully kept White House papers upon his January 2021 departure from office after his unsuccessful 2020 re-election effort, agents searched Mar-a-Lago with a judge’s approval.
The probe aims to identify those responsible for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information and to ascertain whether or not any such documents are still missing. Documents marked as confidential, secret, or top secret were at the center of the 11th Circuit’s decision.
Ms. Cannon, ruling over Mr. Trump’s case to limit Justice Department access to confiscated information, blocked any review and designated Mr. Dearie to evaluate the records, delaying the investigation.
Ms. Cannon, who’d been nominated to the court by Mr. Trump, refused on September 15 to partly relax her injunction on the secret files despite the government’s plea to do so to reduce the damage to national security posed by their prospective revelation.
On the three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit, two judges were selected by Mr. Trump, and previous President Obama chose another.
The 11th Circuit said that Mr. Trump “has not even tried to prove that he has a need to know the material contained in the confidential papers” and that it is unlikely that he has any “individual interest” in classified records, which are the property of the United States government.