The former president enters the legal wrangling. But did he move too late?
Former President Donald Trump made his first foray into the legal fight over the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, seeking the appointment of a “special master” to screen seized materials for potential privileged information.
In a legal filing Monday afternoon in federal court in Florida, attorneys for Trump asked the court to appoint a third party to sift through the records FBI seized two weeks ago as part of an investigation into unlawful retention of classified information, misappropriation of presidential and federal records and potential obstruction of justice.
“This matter has captured the attention of the American public,” Trump’s motion says. “Merely adequate safeguards are not acceptable when the matter at hand involves not only the constitutional rights of President Trump, but also the preservation of executive privilege.”
In the submission, styled as a “Motion for Judicial Oversight and Additional Relief,” Trump’s lawyers also asked that investigators be blocked from further review of the seized materials until a third-party review process is in place.
The court assigned Trump’s requests to Fort Pierce, Fla.-based U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee confirmed by the Senate about a week after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.
It’s unclear whether Cannon will be the first to rule on Trump’s requests or whether that will be the magistrate judge who granted the warrant, Bruce Reinhart. A Reinhart decision would, in any event, be subject to appeal to a district court judge such as Cannon.
Trump’s attorneys said they were informed by a prosecutor that a Justice Department “filter team” is reviewing the seized records to cull out any privileged materials, but the Trump lawyers contend that safeguard isn’t sufficient.
The 27-page filing is replete with Trump’s typical political bombast, including boasts about the power of the former president’s 2022 campaign endorsements and about the Mar-a-Lgo estate itself. But it also confirmed aspects of the timeline related to the Mar-a-Lago search, including the fact that the Justice Department issued two subpoenas prior to the search — one for documents on May 11 and another for security camera footage in late June.
The filing also describes repeated contacts between Justice Department counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt and Trump’s legal team over the course of several months, including a phone call from the former to the latter at 9:10 am on August 8 to inform them that “a group of FBI agents was at Mar-a-Lago to execute a search warrant.” The search, the filing says, lasted “approximately nine hours.”
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NEW: Trump’s filing is replete with his political bombast but also confirms key elements of the timeline:
-DOJ subpoenaed for records in May
-DOJ subpoenaed for camera footage in JuneNotably, no Trump lawyers described their own interactions w DOJ. https://t.co/99fmCxk9J6
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 22, 2022
The judge Aileen Cannon is a Trump appointee. But Trump hasn’t had much luck with “his” judges. They aren’t as grateful for their appointment as he expected.
This is a sham. Won’t go anywhere. And shame on his lawyers for going through with this farce.
Someone is very very AFRAID of what the @fbi found in the bridal suite. He should be. pic.twitter.com/uaAJ1xHj1i
— Reed Galen (@reedgalen) August 22, 2022
I haven’t found the whole motion yet, only excerpts, but it reads like something he would write. No proper legal argument whatsoever; just a lot of whining. He doesn’t seem to have any legal standards to support his claims or for the appointment of a special master.
The big problem in this motion is that it really doesn’t matter whether the documents are top secret, privileged or whatever. They do not belong to Donald Trump. He violated the law by not turning the documents over to the National Archives. And he failed to comply with repeated requests and a valid subpoena for their return.
By the way, Trump was treated far more generously than anyone else stealing documents would have been. If you or I had stolen documents belonging to the US Government, there would have been no informal requests or a subpoena. There would have been a real raid and we peasants would have been arrested.
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