A federal appeals court panel’s decision ordering the end of the outside examination of records seized by the FBI from former President Donald Trump’s Florida club went into effect on Thursday without Trump’s appeal.
The U.S. court’s three-judge panel Last Monday, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found unanimously that a federal district court judge had erred when she chose an impartial arbiter, or special master, to examine the about 13,000 documents seized by the FBI on August 8 when it carried out a search order at Mar-a-Lago.
Federal prosecutors have revealed in court filings that some 100 of the materials taken by the former president, who requested the special master’s appointment, from the White House to his South Florida resort at the end of his term were marked as classified.
Additionally, the unclassified data could not be used by Justice Department investigators as they looked into how Trump handled private government information and whether there had been any obstruction of justice. However, the injunction imposed by the United States was lifted by the 11th Circuit. In September, District Judge Aileen Cannon granted access to the FBI’s unclassified materials to investigators.
The former president will “continue to battle against law enforcement becoming militarized and pursue appropriate legal routes to obtain the assets that were shamelessly and illegally confiscated from his house during the Biden regime’s unconstitutional raid,” according to Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung.
The group of 103 classified documents was now again available to the investigator’s thanks to a previous ruling from a different 11th Circuit court, which also decided to keep them out of the special master’s review’s authority.
Trump had until Thursday to request an urgent stay of the decision, ask the full 11th Circuit to rehear the issue, or file an appeal with the United States Supreme Court after the appeals court panel stated that its mandate would not go into force for seven days. High Court.
The lengthy legal dispute resulting from Trump’s request for the special master to review the data was finally resolved late Thursday afternoon when the clerk of the 11th Circuit delivered a letter to the federal district court in Miami stating that the mandate had come into force.
The American special master By December 16, District Judge Raymond Dearie was expected to have finished reviewing the documents that had been taken.
The three-judge panel’s decision, which was made up of Chief Judge William Pryor, Judges Britt Grant, and Andrew Brasher, was a major win for the Justice Department, which has been looking into Trump’s handling of private government documents for several months. Grant and Brasher were appointed by Trump, whereas former President George W. Bush appointed Pryor.
Last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland named Jack Smith as a special counsel to lead the Justice Department’s investigation into the storage of confidential government records at Mar-a-Lago as well as a separate investigation into attempts to obstruct the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election.
The 11th Circuit court rejected that claim and pointed out that even if Trump did consider the records to be “personal,” federal agents were still permitted to acquire them in accordance with a search warrant.
By stating that the federal magistrate judge who issued the warrant “agreed that reasonable cause existed to think that evidence of criminal breaches would likely be located at Mar-a-Lago,” the appeals court made it quite obvious that the execution of the search was legal.
Separately, Trump urged Cannon last month to direct the Justice Department to send him an undisclosed copy of the affidavit outlining the government’s reasoning for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. In August, a redacted copy of the affidavit was made available to the public.
The National Archives and Records Administration removed 15 boxes of paperwork from Mar-a-Lago in January and discovered approximately 150 records with classified markings inside. This discovery sparked the Justice Department’s investigation. All told, about 300 classified documents, including the 103 records seized in the August search, have been retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. Among them, “several indicate the highest levels of classification and extremely limited distribution,” according to prosecutors.
Dearie has also been told by federal attorneys that Trump might have mixed up private items from after his presidency with sensitive official records. Two confidential cover sheets, one marked SECRET, and the other CONFIDENTIAL were reportedly combined with three personal communications dated after the end of the Trump administration, according to court documents. According to the prosecution, the letters came from a pastor, an author, and a pollster.
