A federal judge on Monday granted former president Donald Trump’s petition for an independent court-selected arbiter to sift through the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, temporarily blocking the government from probing the contents, except for national-security considerations, until the assessment is complete.
Intelligence agencies will be permitted to continue their damage assessment of the classified documents recovered from the property with the goal of determining whether there was “potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents,” the judge ruled.
Judge Aileen Cannon’s Monday decision comes after she announced last month that she had “preliminary intent” to appoint a special master, or a representative of the court who would single out the privileged material from the seized evidence, citing the “exceptional circumstances presented” in the case.
Trump filed the motion for a “special master” in late August, arguing that a third-party review is necessary because the FBI raid of his home so close to the 2022 midterm elections “involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump.” He insisted that he had been in discussions with the government for months to return records he took from the White House to the National Archives.
Prosecutors for the government contend that Trump is making false claims that the documents belong to him when they are in fact government property. They also said a special master was redundant because the Justice Department has a “filter team” that determines if any confiscated materials should be shielded from government scrutiny under Trump’s attorney-client privilege.
Cannon ordered the parties to submit by September 9 a joint filing including a list of possible people to fill the special-master role as well as a draft order outlining the special master’s “duties and limitations,” according to the court filing obtained by CNBC.
While the judge said she found no “compelling showing of callous disregard for [Trump’s] constitutional rights,” she suggested that the mere optics of a former president’s home being searched could potentially prejudice the investigation against him.
“As a function of Plaintiff’s former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own,” Cannon wrote. “A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.”
Trump has also “persuasively argued,” Cannon wrote, that a special-master review may be his only legal recourse while he claims that the government took his property. She reiterated that the court has taken into account the “undeniably unprecedented nature of the search of a former president’s residence” and the fact that Trump has had to depend on negotiations with the Biden administration in power to secure the ownership and exchange of documents.