A federal appeals court has acted to shut down an outside review of the Justice Department’s use of nearly 3,000 documents the FBI seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August.
A federal appeals court has acted to shut down an outside review of the Justice Department’s use of nearly 3,000 documents the FBI seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August.
A panel of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that a district court judge erred both by granting Trump’s request to block investigators’ access to the records and in her decision to appoint a special master to assess Trump’s claims that some of the documents could be protected by executive privilege or other legal doctrines.
“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 three-judge panel wrote in a 21-page opinion. “Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our case law limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
The ruling — issued by the circuit court’s Chief Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee, and two of Trump’s own appeals court picks — represents another major setback for the former president and a clear victory for the Justice Department. Prosecutors had been using those records as part of a criminal investigation into alleged retention of national security information, theft of government records and obstruction of justice.
Trump can appeal the ruling to either the full bench of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court, but both prospects are seen as a long-shot.
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A federal appeals court has acted to shut down an outside review of the DOJ's use of nearly 3,000 documents the FBI seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August https://t.co/8fBJDjx8iT
— POLITICO (@politico) December 1, 2022
And two of the judges on that panel were Trump nominees. I suppose next Trump will complain that they are ingrates and disloyal.
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