WASHINGTON — The Justice Department will appeal a judge’s ruling for a special master to look at the documents seized during the search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a notification filed Thursday.
The Justice Department will file their appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the filing said.
The Justice Department also asked for a partial stay of the judge’s ruling while the appeal is pending, saying “the government and the public are irreparably injured when a criminal investigation of matters involving risks to national security is enjoined.”
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a 41-year-old Trump appointee who was confirmed to the Southern District of Florida at the tail-end of the Trump administration, granted Trump’s request for a special master on Monday. Her ruling was widely panned by the legal community, especially given her unprecedented decision to give a special master authority not only over documents protected by attorney-client privilege but over Trump’s purported claims of executive privilege.
“The classification markings establish on the face of the documents that they are government records, not Plaintiff’s personal records,” the government wrote Thursday. “The government’s review of those records does not raise any plausible attorney-client privilege claims because such classified records do not contain communications between Plaintiff and his private attorneys. And for several reasons, no potential assertion of executive privilege could justify restricting the Executive Branch’s review and use of the classified records at issue here.”
When the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago one month ago, the Justice Department says it found more than 11,000 pages of government documents that — under the Presidential Records Act — belonged in the custody of the National Archives. They also found hundreds of pages on documents with classified markings, despite the fact that a Trump lawyer attested that the former president no longer possessed classified records after turning over 38 classified documents in June in response to a grand jury subpoena. Earlier in the year, Trump turned over boxes of documents to the National Archives that contained more than 700 pages of classified records.
The government argued that there was evidence that the Trump team “concealed and removed” additional classified documents that had been stored at Mar-a-Lago before the FBI’s August search took place.
A federal magistrate judge found probable cause that evidence of crimes would be found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and signed off on the FBI’s warrant to search the property. In fact, the FBI found more than 100 classified records that Trump was not supposed to have, DOJ said in a court filing last week, along with the more than 11,000 government documents that properly belonged in the National Archives.
Daniel Barnes and Ken Dilanian contributed.