Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers might be going for the legal jugular in the ongoing fight between the Biden Justice Department and the former president over classified information seized from his Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8.
It’s been over a month, and while some information appears to be classified—the government over-classifies everything—the critical legal area that’s glossed over is that Trump probably was well within his legal rights to possess them. Some documents taken by FBI agents were Time magazine covers, while others were empty folders. The president has near-absolute authority to declassify any record, a power affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1988.
Still, the Trump legal team did file a motion for a special master to review the documents to which the DOJ objected, citing a national security risk. Judge Aileen Cannon issued an injunction against any further analysis by the FBI of the papers and granted the Trump team’s motion for a special master. The latest round of lawfare revolves around candidates for that position, for which there is a Grand Canyon-sized chasm between the government and Trump’s lawyers on who is acceptable.
The latest motion filed by Trump’s legal team seeks to further block the Justice Department from reviewing the documents. It also brought the heat in their 21-page filing that torched the legal justification for the FBI’s raid and the seizure of documents from the property (via The Guardian):
Lawyers for Donald Trump asked a federal judge on Monday to deny the justice department’s request to regain access to some documents the FBI seized from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort and restart the criminal investigation into his unauthorized retention of government documents.
The response from the Trump legal team reiterated that it wanted a so-called special master to review all of the seized materials, asking the judge to uphold her earlier order barring prosecutors from using the documents in a criminal investigation until the process was complete.
But in the 21-page filing, Trump’s lawyers interpreted the Presidential Records Act in sometimes unusual ways, and accused the justice department of criminalizing what they considered a dispute between Trump and the National Archives about how documents should be handled.
“In what at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control,” the response from the Trump legal team said, “the government wrongfully seeks to criminalize the possession by the 45th president of his own presidential and personal records.”
Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose legal analysis we’ve featured prominently here, added that this filing “puts the dagger through the heart of the Biden DOJ’s bogus, political charade.”
They Certainly WILL !!!! And SHOULD !!!