Appeals court rules against Trump in documents fight

The three-judge 11th Circuit panel said the U.S. District lacked the authority to grant Trump’s request for a special master made in a lawsuit after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate. Pic/AP

A U.S. appeals court on Thursday dealt a blow to Donald Trump, reversing a judge's appointment of an independent arbiter to vet documents seized by the FBI from his Florida home and allowing all of the records to be used in a criminal investigation of the former president.

The Atlanta-based 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favour of the Justice Department in its challenge to Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's September decision to name a "special master" to review the records to decide if some should be kept from investigators.

The three-judge 11th Circuit panel said Cannon lacked the authority to grant Trump's request for a special master made in a lawsuit he filed two weeks after FBI agents carried out a court-approved Aug. 8 search at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach. It also overturned Cannon's decision to bar investigators from accessing most of the records pending the review and threw out Trump's suit.

Donald Trump

Trump faces a federal criminal investigation into his retention of sensitive government records after leaving office in January 2021, including whether he violated a 1917 law called the Espionage Act that makes it a crime to release information harmful to national security. Investigators also are looking into potential unlawful obstruction of the probe. FBI agents seized about 11,000 records, including about 100 marked as classified, during the search.

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The 11th Circuit said that while a search warrant for a former president's property is "extraordinary," it did not give "the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation." The court also said Trump did not prove there was a "callous disregard" for his constitutional rights in the search of his property, one of the few reasons a court can intervene in an ongoing investigation.

"The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant," the panel wrote. "Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so."

A Trump spokesperson called the decision "purely procedural and based only on jurisdiction," and said it did not address the merits of the case. "President Donald J. Trump will continue to fight against the weaponised Department of ‘Justice,' while standing for America and Americans," the spokesperson added.

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