Former President Donald Trump suffered a major defeat Thursday after a federal appeals court halted a third-party review of documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate.
The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit removes a major hurdle in the Department of Justice‘s investigation into the mishandled records from Trump’s time as president. Prosecutors have been seeking to use nearly 3,000 records the FBI seized as part of a criminal investigation into alleged retention of national security information, theft of government documents, and obstruction of justice.
The lower court’s decision to grant a special master won’t be voided until seven days have passed to give Trump time to decide whether to seek a rehearing before the full 11th Circuit bench or appeal to the Supreme Court, the three-judge panel wrote.
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“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote in a 21-page decision. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”
The appeals court said either approach would be a “radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations” and that “both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon appointed Judge Raymond Dearie in September to serve as special master and to review independently the thousands of records seized from Trump’s Florida resort home during an unprecedented FBI raid in August, but the DOJ appealed that selection.
The 11th Circuit directed the DOJ and Trump’s lawyers to appear in Atlanta last week to debate the issue, which came to a conclusion Thursday evening.
The panel of judges included the circuit’s chief judge, William Pryor, an appointee of George W. Bush, and two other appointees of the former president. The decision marked a stringent rebuke of Cannon’s order. The district judge is a Trump appointee.
“In considering these arguments, we are faced with a choice: apply our usual test; drastically expand the availability of equitable jurisdiction for every subject of a search warrant; or carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents. We choose the first option. So the case must be dismissed,” the court held.
The panel said Cannon’s special master decision marked an instance in which the “district court stepped in with its own reasoning,” signaling a resounding pushback against the district judge’s September decision.
The DOJ has appointed Jack Smith to oversee the federal criminal investigations into Trump’s handling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
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Trump has slammed Smith’s appointment, arguing he is “compromised” and a “political hit man.”
Smith was previously tasked with investigating war crimes in Kosovo and has vowed to “exercise independent judgment and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate.”
