The Department of Justice appealed on Friday a judge’s ruling that temporarily barred the government from reviewing the confiscated Mar-a-Lago raid records as part of a criminal probe into former president Trump and appointed an independent arbiter to review them.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s move to block the government from accessing the documents hinders the intelligence’s community’s ongoing national security risk assessment, the DOJ argued in its motion.

“The district court has entered an unprecedented order enjoining the Executive Branch's use of its own highly classified records in a criminal investigation with direct implications for national security,” the DOJ wrote, petitioning the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta for a stay on the lower court’s ruling.

Cannon’s order had rejected the department’s request to allow the FBI and prosecutors to continue examining the sensitive documents retrieved from Trump’s Florida estate. She also tapped senior U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Dearie to serve as special master to sift through the contents of the search and confirm whether any of them should have been excluded from expropriation under Trump’s claims of executive privilege. The government currently insists that the taken documents now in its possession are its rightful property.

Trump’s executive-privilege pleas are “categorically inapplicable to the records bearing classification markings,” the DOJ asserted Friday. “Plaintiff has no claim for the return of those records, which belong to the government and were seized in a court-authorized search.”

The department said its interest in scrutinizing certain documents is to get to the heart of its current probe and determine whether an indictment of Trump is merited.

“The records here are not merely relevant evidence; they are the very objects of the offense,” the DOJ said. Cannon’s order “prohibits the government from accessing the seized records to evaluate whether charges are appropriate,” it claimed.

An earlier court decision granting Trump a special master had reasoned that such a third-party screening may be his only legal recourse to recover what he claims to be his. Cannon also said the “undeniably unprecedented nature of the search of a former president's residence” was part of her consideration.

“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,” she said. “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.”

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DOJ Appeals Judge's Ruling on Mar-a-Lago Raid Documents

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