(TheLibertyRevolution.com)- Tuesday, the Biden administration pleaded with the Supreme Court to avoid becoming involved in a court dispute over secret records that the FBI had found while searching for former President Donald Trump’s Florida home.
Trump is asking the high court to reverse a lower court decision and allow an impartial judge, or special master, to examine the roughly 100 documents marked with secret information obtained during the Mar-a-Lago search on August 8 to consider the emergency appeal.
According to the Justice Department, Trump’s assertion is without substance, noted in a 32-page filing, the case includes “susceptible government records.”
Last month, a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals in Atlanta restricted the special master’s review to the far bigger batch of non-classified materials. The judges, who included two Trump appointments, agreed with the Justice Department, which had argued that the special master lacked the legal authority to examine the secret information on his own.
According to Trump’s attorneys, the special master must have access to the classified records to “determine whether documents bearing classification markings are classified, and regardless of classification, whether those records are personal records or Presidential records,” according to their application to the Supreme Court.
The authority granted to Raymond Dearie, a seasoned Brooklyn judge appointed last month to act as a special master and separate any documents taken from Mar-a-Lago that might be subject to claims of executive privilege or attorney-client confidentiality, is in question. Approximately 11,000 documents, including about 100 with classification markings, were taken during the search on August 8.
Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge who appointed Dearie, permitted him to examine the roughly 100 classified documents, and she paused the use of those files in the Justice Department’s criminal probe pending the conclusion of the special master’s assessment.
However, the appeals court overturned that portion of Cannon’s more comprehensive decision, agreeing with the Justice Department’s claims that Dearie was not required to analyze the classified documents because they were not likely to entail privilege problems. The Trump campaign then filed an appeal.
The 11th Circuit is hearing an appeal from the Justice Department regarding the entirety of Cannon’s decision. The department referred to the order as “an unprecedented order by the district court restricting the Executive Branch’s use of its own highly classified records in an ongoing criminal investigation and directing the dissemination of those records outside the Executive Branch for a special-master review” in its filing with the Supreme Court.
