A federal court on Monday agreed to appoint a special master to examine documents the FBI acquired during its search of former President Donald Trump’s South Florida home.
The judge also prohibited the Justice Department from using the documents in its investigation while the review was underway.
The special master would be entrusted with searching the confiscated property for “possibly privileged evidence susceptible to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege,” according to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s 24-page order.
The government is prohibited from “reviewing and exploiting the seized documents for investigative purposes” until the special master’s review is finished or until another court order is issued.
For “purposes of intelligence classification and national security assessments,” Cannon still let the government to continue looking at and utilising the documents it had collected.
Trump’s legal team and Justice Department attorneys have until September 9 to “meaningfully confer” and file a joint document with the court that includes a list of potential special master candidates and a proposed explanation of the review’s procedures.
Two weeks had passed since the FBI’s Aug. 8 search warrant execution at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, during which time investigators seized 33 items from the former president’s office and a storage room on the property.
The Justice Department revealed in a filing last month that more than 100 documents with classification markings were discovered in 13 boxes or containers, while three documents with “confidential” and “secret” classification markings were taken from desks in Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago.
According to a full inventory of goods recovered from Mar-a-Lago made public last week, the FBI also discovered 48 empty folders with “classified” flags amid newspaper and magazine articles, books, and items of apparel housed in boxes or containers removed from the storage space.
The former president informed the court last month that the FBI took “presumptively privileged” documents from his time in office and argued that an impartial third party should be chosen to uphold his constitutional rights.
The sensitive records that Trump brought with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his presidency, according to Trump, are “his own presidential records.”
Trump has also criticised the Justice Department for what he called a “unprecedented, unnecessary, and legally unsupported” search of his property.
Nevertheless, the Justice Department, which opposed the appointment of a special master, informed the court that the records obtained by the FBI did not belong to Trump and should have been given back to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of the administration.
Federal prosecutors also claimed that a special master wasn’t necessary because records that might be protected by executive or attorney-client privileges had already been examined by an FBI filter team, which is used to sort through and separate documents that may be privileged.
Investigators are looking into how Trump handled sensitive information, particularly the documents he brought to Mar-a-Lago after he left office in January 2021. They are also looking into any potential obstruction of the investigation.
The investigation was prompted by a referral made by the Archives in February after it successfully recovered 15 boxes of presidential records from Mar-a-Lago after months of unsuccessful attempts to do so. According to the Justice Department, FBI agents examined the boxes in May and discovered 184 documents with classification markings.
Federal prosecutors claimed that after the Justice Department obtained and served a grand jury subpoena for any documents in Trump’s possession bearing classification markings, the government “developed evidence that [government records] were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago in an extraordinary 36-page court filing on August 30. Additionally, they said that “efforts were probably made to hinder” the Justice Department’s inquiry.
Trump’s request for a special master was heard by Cannon last week, but he chose not to rule from the bench. However, she did order the release of the whole list of items that the FBI had taken during its search at Mar-a-Lago, which was made public on Friday. She also ordered the publication of the government’s explanation of the current state of their reviews.