Lawyers for Donald Trump have not directly claimed in legal filings that he declassified records seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago, despite the former president’s repeated assertions that he did, but they nevertheless scored a win in the special master saga.
A federal judge denied the Justice Department’s motion for a partial stay that sought to allow the use of classified documents obtained during an FBI raid on Trump’s Florida resort home, and the judge also appointed a special master who had been offered up by the former president.
Judge Aileen Cannon said the DOJ wanted her to accept the premise “that all of the approximately 100 documents isolated by the Government … are classified government records.”
But she said she “does not find it appropriate to accept the Government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party.”
TRUMP SPECIAL MASTER SIGNED OFF ON CARTER PAGE FISA
The judge ruled she will direct the special master “to prioritize review of the approximately 100 documents marked as classified.”
Judge Raymond Dearie, the new special master, was a former FISA court judge who signed off on the final warrant against Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
Trump claimed again on Thursday that all the records seized had been declassified.
“Remember this. Everything was declassified, No. 1,” Trump said when asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt if he had taken the documents down to his Florida resort home after declassifying them intentionally.
The DOJ’s Tuesday filing had argued Trump “does not actually assert — much less provide any evidence — that any of the seized records bearing classification markings have been declassified.”
Trump’s team pushed back the next day without directly claiming the former president had declassified the Mar-a-Lago documents.
“The Government’s stance assumes that if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified irrespective of any actions taken during President Trump’s term in office,” Trump’s lawyers told the court Monday, arguing “the President enjoys absolute authority under the Executive Order to declassify any information.”
“The argument goes, as President Trump has no right to have the documents returned to him — because the Government has unilaterally determined they are classified — the Government should be permitted to continue to use them, in conjunction with the intelligence communities, to build a criminal case against him,” Trump’s attorneys told the judge. “However, there still remains a disagreement as to the classification status of the documents. The Government’s position therefore assumes a fact not yet established.”
Former Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel had told Breitbart in May he was present with Trump when the former president said, “We are declassifying this information.”
On Thursday, Trump said: “That’s correct, and not only that, I think it was other people also were there. But I have the absolute right to declassify.”
Trump has contended he had a “standing order” throughout his presidency that “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.” Several former Trump administration officials have cast doubt on that notion.
The DOJ has said that when Trump’s team handed over documents in January and again in June, it did not assert that the records had been declassified.
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Trump attorney M. Evan Corcoran pointed to “a few bedrock principles” in a May letter to the DOJ, including that “A President Has Absolute Authority To Declassify Documents” and that “Presidential Actions Involving Classified Documents Are Not Subject To Criminal Sanction.”
