WASHINGTON —Former President Donald Trump’s legal team is standing by its request for the appointment of a neutral third party — a so-called Special Master — to review materials seized by the FBI in its court-authorized search of Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate on August 8.
The Justice Department, in a late night court filing Tuesday, argued against it. A court hearing on the matter takes place Thursday.
The Justice Department claims classified documents were “likely concealed and removed” from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate as part of an effort to obstruct the federal investigation into the discovery of the government records.
The timeline laid out by the Justice Department made clear that the extraordinary search of Mar-a-Lago came only after other efforts to retrieve the records had failed and that it resulted from law enforcement suspicion that additional documents remained inside the property despite assurances by Trump representatives that a “diligent search” had accounted for all of the material.
It also included a picture of some of the seized documents with colored cover sheets indicating their classified status, perhaps as a way to rebut suggestions that whoever packed them or handled them at Mar-a-Lago could have easily failed to appreciate their sensitive nature.
The photo shows the cover pages of a smattering of paperclip-bound classified documents — some marked as “TOP SECRET//SCI” with bright yellow borders and one marked as “SECRET//SCI” with a rust-colored border — along with whited-out pages, splayed out on a carpet at Mar-a-Lago. Beside them sits a cardboard box filled with gold-framed pictures, including a Time magazine cover.
Though it contains significant new details on the investigation, the Justice Department filing does not resolve a core question that has driven public fascination with the investigation — why Trump held onto the documents after he left the White House and why he and his team resisted repeated efforts to give them back. In fact, it suggests officials may not have received an answer.
During a June 3 visit to Mar-a-Lago by FBI and Justice Department officials, the document states, “Counsel for the former President offered no explanation as to why boxes of government records, including 38 documents with classification markings, remained at the Premises nearly five months after the production of the Fifteen Boxes and nearly one-and-a-half years after the end of the Administration.”
That visit, which came weeks after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records, receives substantial attention in the document and appears to be a key investigative focus.
But Townhall.com echos comments from supporters of the former president reporting, “They’re not nuclear secrets. It’s the classic example of the government overclassifying documents, which Mike Davis, a former law clerk to Neil Gorsuch, alluded to in the wake of this raid. We also know that federal agents absconded with records that shouldn’t have been taken, like those protected under attorney-client privilege. And again, classified documents are not an issue here. Trump was the president. He can declassify any record with absolute authority. The media is trying to make this seem like a Hillary Clinton-like story. It’s not.”