The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to reject former President Donald Trump‘s request for the nation’s highest court to intervene in a dispute over classified documents seized from Trump’s Florida residence in August.
Trump last week filed an emergency request asking the justices to intervene after a federal appeals court granted the government’s request to carve out about 100 pages of classified records from the third-party special master review of the documents retrieved from his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.
The special master presiding in the case, U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, is overseeing a review of the remaining 11,000-plus documents obtained by the FBI during a court-approved raid at Trump’s residence this summer.
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SCORES WIN AGAINST TRUMP IN MAR-A-LAGO RAID CASE ON SPECIAL MASTER APPEAL
The DOJ defended the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’s finding of a “serious and unwarranted intrusion on the Executive Branch’s authority,” according to court records filed on Tuesday.
“This application concerns 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,” DOJ Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote.
The DOJ also argued that Trump’s legal team has not shown “sufficient reason” needed for the high court’s intervention as justification for the high court to deny the former president’s request.
“Indeed, because applicant has no plausible claims of ownership of or privilege in the documents bearing classification markings, he will suffer no harm at all from a temporary stay of the special master’s review of those materials while the government’s appeal proceeds. And applicant further undermined any claim that he is suffering irreparable injury from the stay by opposing the government’s motion to expedite the underlying appeal and urging that oral argument be deferred until ‘January 2023 or later,’” the DOJ added in its filing.
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Justice Clarence Thomas, who oversees the 11th Circuit, has been asked to grant Trump’s application. Thomas could grant the application himself, reject it, or ask for a full court vote. No deadline has been slated for any action.
Federal law deems White House records as federal property that must be handed over to the National Archives upon the departure of a president from the Oval Office. Trump contends he did nothing wrong and has asked Dearie to determine the status of all documents, including classified ones seized by the FBI.
