Former US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is seen in Palm Beach, Florida on February 8, 2021.
Marco Bello | Reuters
The Justice Department revealed late Tuesday that the FBI seized more than 100 classified documents from former President Donald Trump’s Florida home earlier this month, as the department urged a judge to reject the Trump’s request to have these and other records reviewed by a special master.
The Justice Department argued in a court filing that Trump lacked the legal capacity to make such a request and that appointing a special master could harm national security. He also said law enforcement officials had evidence that government records were likely hidden and removed from a storage room at Trump’s home at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, “and that efforts were likely made to obstruct government investigation.”
Trump had asked to block the Justice Department from further investigating the materials obtained during the raid until a court-appointed special master could analyze them.
“As an initial matter, the former president lacks standing to seek injunctive relief or oversight of presidential records because those records do not belong to him,” the DOJ wrote to Judge Aileen Cannon of the U.S. District Court in South Florida .
Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, has a hearing set for Thursday at 1 p.m. ET in a West Palm Beach court.
Not only is it “unnecessary” to appoint a special master, but doing so would “significantly harm important government interests, including those of national security,” prosecutors wrote.
That harm could include preventing the intelligence community’s “continuing review of the national security risk” that could have been caused by “improper storage of these highly sensitive materials,” the DOJ argued.
Documents seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago
Source: Department of Justice
The response came a day after the DOJ revealed to a federal judge that its review of the seized materials was complete.
A law enforcement team identified a “limited set” of materials that may be protected by attorney-client privilege, the DOJ told the court on Monday. This privilege often refers to the legal doctrine that protects the confidentiality of communications between a lawyer and his client.
The so-called Privilege Review Team, which is separate from the investigation that led the FBI to search Trump’s residence earlier this month, is following a process to “address potential privilege disputes, if any,” the DOJ wrote.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, “is also leading an intelligence community assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the release of these materials,” according to the presentation.
The DOJ is conducting a criminal investigation into the removal of White House documents and their shipment to Trump’s residence at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach when he left office.
By law, presidential records must be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration when a president leaves office.
The National Archives and Records Administration retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago in January. The following month, NARA sent a referral to the DOJ that the records contained “highly classified documents mixed in with other records,” according to the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant for Trump’s home on Aug. 8.
The DOJ said in Tuesday night’s filing that the FBI had “discovered multiple sources of evidence indicating … that classified documents remained” at Mar-a-Lago.
“The government also developed evidence that government records were likely hidden and removed from storage and that efforts were likely made to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the DOJ wrote.
That evidence contradicted a June 3 letter from the custodian of Trump records, which certified that “any and all” documents responsive to a grand jury subpoena had been turned over, the DOJ wrote.
The August search “cast serious doubt on the certification’s assertion … that there had been a ‘diligent search’ of records responsive to the grand jury subpoena,” according to the DOJ filing.
Of the evidence collected in that raid, “more than one hundred unique documents with classification marks were seized, more than double the amount produced on June 3, 2022, in response to the grand jury subpoena,” the DOJ wrote.
Before the DOJ released its response late last night, a group of former government officials asked the judge to let them file a brief as “amici curiae” (Latin for “friends of the court”) arguing against Trump’s requests.
The group included six former federal prosecutors who served in Republican administrations, as well as former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who governed as a Republican but backed President Joe Biden over Trump in 2020.
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