A Florida 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.
Intelligence agencies will be permitted to continue their damage assessment of the classified documents recovered from the property with the goal of gathering 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.
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