Trump asks judge to keep blocking FBI from working with sized classified files
Lawyers for former President Donald Trump asked a federal judge on Monday to deny the Justice Department’s request to immediately restart a key part of its criminal investigation into his hoarding of sensitive government documents at his residence in Florida.
Renewing their request for an expansive independent review of records seized from Trump, the former president’s legal team argued that documents marked as classified should remain off limits to the FBI and prosecutors. They asked the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, to maintain her order barring agents from using any of the materials taken from his estate, until an outside arbiter, known as a special master has vetted all of them.
The 21-page filing was an aggressive rebuke of the Justice Department’s broader inquiry into whether Trump or his aides illegally kept national security secrets at his property, Mar-a-Lago, or obstructed the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve the materials. It played down the criminal inquiry as a “storage dispute” and insinuated that officials might have leaked information about the contents of the files.
“This investigation of the 45th president of the United States is both unprecedented and misguided,” the filing said. “In what at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control, the government wrongfully seeks to criminalize the possession by the 45th president of his own presidential and personal records.”
The filing on Monday was the latest salvo in what threatens to become a protracted court fight over a special master and the powers that person should have in filtering the trove of seized documents. Central to that dispute is whether the special master’s review should extend to blocking investigators from using any records potentially protected by executive privilege.
The filing underscored how he has succeeded for now in using what amounts to a procedural sideshow to stall the criminal investigation.
Prosecutors had asked Cannon last week to let investigators resume working with about 100 documents marked as classified that formed a small portion of the nearly 13,000 items the FBI seized during a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8.
They said the prohibition on using those materials was hindering the intelligence community’s review of any risk caused by the insecure storage of national security secrets and a classification review of the materials, arguing those efforts were inextricably intertwined with the criminal investigation.