A federal appeals court is allowing the Justice Department to continue reviewing classified documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort.
The emergency intervention overturns a judge’s order on those documents that prevented federal investigators from working on the documents and is a strong rebuke to the Trump team’s attempt to suggest without evidence that the materials were somehow declassified.
A special master review of that subset of about 100 records, which would have allowed Trump’s legal team to see them, has now partially stalled. The special master, Judge Raymond Dearie, can continue his work by reviewing the rest of the material seized from Mar-a-Lago to make sure that records belonging to Trump or that he can claim are confidential are not being used by investigators .
“It is self-evident that the public has a strong interest in ensuring that the storage of classified records would not result in “extremely serious harm to national security,”” the three-judge panel from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. declare yourself “Confirming that necessarily involves examining the documents, determining who had access to them and when, and deciding which (if any) sources or methods are compromised.”
Throughout the trial, Trump’s lawyers have raised vague questions about whether the materials are actually classified. But they have not directly argued in court that the former President defamed them, even as Trump himself claimed out of court that he did.
On Wednesday night, the appeals court ordered Trump’s legal team to withdraw.
“Plaintiff suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President,” the court wrote. “But the file contains no evidence that any of these files were declassified. And before the special master, the Plaintiff resisted providing any evidence that he had declassified any of these documents.”
Trump’s lawyers also sought to delay any specific disclosures about whether the documents had been declassified while the special master first reviews the materials.
“The records’ classification markings demonstrate that they are government records and that appropriate officials have previously determined that their unauthorized disclosure would cause harm — including ‘extremely serious harm’ — to the Nation’s security,” prosecutors told the 11th Circuit last night. of Tuesday. archiving.
The Justice Department had sought the 11th Circuit’s intervention in the Mar-a-Lago documents controversy after Trump successfully sued to get the appointment of a special master — an independent counsel — to turn over the roughly 11,000 documents obtained by the FBI during his search. Trump’s house.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge who approved Trump’s bid for the review, previously rejected a Justice Department request to stay the parts of her order that applied to the 100 documents identified as classified.
None of the three criminal statutes cited by the FBI when it obtained the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago depended on the classified materials, the DOJ argued.
In seeking to reopen its criminal investigation into the documents, the Justice Department argued that Cannon’s order prevented investigators from taking steps to assess and mitigate national security risks posed by how the documents were handled.
Cannon said he could move forward with a national security assessment of the material conducted by the intelligence community. However, the Justice Department argued that this assessment could not be disconnected from the criminal investigation.
The 11th Circuit flatly rejected Trump’s arguments that he might be interested in classified records that could be withheld from federal criminal investigators.
Trump “does not have a proprietary interest in the documents at issue, so there is no significant harm if the United States reviews documents in which he neither owns nor has a personal interest. Second, we find Plaintiff’s insistence that he will be prejudiced by a criminal investigation unpersuasive,” they wrote.
“Due to the nature of the classified material at issue and based on the record, we have no reason to expect that the United States’ use of these records imposes the risk of disclosure to the United States of Plaintiff’s privileged information,” they wrote. .
This story has been updated with additional details.
