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A federal appeals court on Thursday halted an outside review of thousands of documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, ruling that a lower court judge erred in appointing an expert to decide whether any of the materials had to be protected from criminal investigators. .
Trump sought the outside arbitrator, known as a special master, after the FBI executed a court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago, his home and private club, on Aug. 8, recovering more than 13,000 documents related to Trump’s time in the White House. About 100 of the documents were classified, and some contained extremely sensitive government secrets, according to court records.
The appeals court’s decision was a landslide victory for the Justice Department and the latest legal loss for Trump, who has gone to court several times to try to block the government from accessing records or personal information. Last week, the Supreme Court denied the former president’s request to block a congressional committee from receiving six years’ worth of copies of his tax returns, clearing the way for them to be released to lawmakers.
Thursday’s unanimous decision, which Trump can appeal to the Supreme Court, means criminal investigators can regain access to unclassified documents recovered in the search. The Justice Department has said the materials could be important in its investigation into the possible mishandling of classified documents, obstruction and destruction of government property at Mar-a-Lago.
An earlier appeals court decision exempted documents with classified marks from special master review.
In addition to potentially stalling the investigation, the special master review provided Trump’s lawyers with a public platform to present their arguments about why they believed the Mar-a-Lago search was unfair. While those arguments didn’t hold much sway with the justices, they may have galvanized Trump’s political base nonetheless.
“Today’s panel decision is purely procedural and based on jurisdiction alone,” a Trump spokesman said in a statement. “The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal and unjustified attack on Mar-a-Lago.”
Read the appeals court’s decision
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon of Florida agreed months ago to appoint Judge Raymond J. Dearie of Brooklyn as a special master to review the Mar-a-Lago documents, rejecting the Justice Department’s argument that former presidents cannot claim executive privileges after leaving office. Cannon also noted that the FBI took some of Trump’s personal materials that were mixed in with government documents.
But appointments of special masters are rare, and judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit expressed concern during oral arguments that Cannon’s decision set a troubling precedent: allowing the target of a search warrant goes to court and requests a special master who could interfere with an executive branch investigation before an indictment is issued.
The three justices, two of whom were appointed by Trump, did not retreat from that position in their written opinion Thursday. They said they could not issue a warrant that “allowed any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the warrant is executed.”
“Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so,” Thursday’s opinion said. “Either approach would be a radical reordering of our jurisprudence by limiting the involvement of federal courts in criminal investigations. And both would violate fundamental separation of powers limitations.”
During oral arguments, government lawyer Sopan Joshi termed the decision to appoint a special master as an “intrusion” into the executive branch.
But James Trusty, a lawyer for Trump, said the special appointment of the master did not significantly hinder the government’s criminal investigation. Trusty said the Mar-a-Lago search was conducted in a “carte blanco” fashion, with officers taking personal items including golf shirts and a photo of singer Celine Dion.
In their opinion, the justices struck down a central part of Trump’s legal team’s argument: that presidential records laws allowed Trump to classify presidential documents as personal, creating the need for a special master to determine whether personal documents should be protected from investigators. .
The justices conceded that a search of a former president’s property is “indeed extraordinary … but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or otherwise gives judicial license to interfere with an investigation in progress”.
Ultimately, the justices said the documents’ status as personal or presidential should not determine whether a special master’s order is needed. The Mar-a-Lago search warrant, in the opinion, was properly approved by a judge; Future court proceedings could assess whether Trump was in legal possession of the seized documents.
“The magistrate decided this issue by approving the order. To the extent that the categorization of these documents has legal relevance in future proceedings, the issue may be raised at that time,” the opinion reads. “All such arguments are a sideshow.”
Dearie’s review was expected to conclude this month. He has made no recommendation to Cannon about whether the documents should be protected from criminal investigators. But during public hearings, he has expressed deep skepticism that Trump could claim privilege over large parts of the documents.
“My view is you can’t have your cake and eat it too,” he said at a hearing in September, after Trump’s lawyers suggested that Trump might have declassified some of the sensitive seized materials, but he did not say he did
The Mar-a-Lago investigation is one of three criminal investigations involving Trump that have gained momentum over the past year. The Justice Department is also investigating the role of Trump and his allies in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including any possible involvement in the bloody riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. as members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence. they were formally counting President Biden’s election victory.
Attorney General Merrick Garland recently appointed a special counsel to oversee those two investigations, saying it was important to avoid any potential conflicts of interest for the Justice Department as Trump launches a new bid for the White House and Biden says also plans to run.
Additionally, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) is investigating the role of Trump and his allies in trying to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory in Georgia.
The top prosecutor joins the Mar-a-Lago investigation as the legal team gathers evidence
The appeals court that issued Thursday’s opinion included Judge William H. Pryor, the former Alabama attorney general who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush and whom Trump considered for a Supreme Court appointment while in the White House.
The court’s other two justices, Andrew L. Brasher and Britt C. Grant, are Trump nominees. They also served on the three-judge panel that ruled against Trump earlier this fall on limited aspects of the master’s special appointment, restoring criminal investigators’ access to the 103 classified documents.
In considering the arguments of Trump’s lawyers, the justices wrote: “we are faced with a choice: apply our usual test; dramatically expand the availability of equitable jurisdiction for every subject of a search warrant; or create an unprecedented exception to our law for former presidents. We choose the first option. Therefore, the case must be dismissed.”
The judges said the seizure of personal items in a court-approved search did not require the appointment of a special chief.
“While plaintiff may have an interest in these items and others like them, we see no need for their immediate return upon seizure pursuant to a presumptively lawful search warrant,” Thursday’s opinion said.
Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
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