Former President Donald Trump told an appeals court a judge was justified in appointing a special master to referee the government’s seizure of records from his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Lawyers for Trump said in a court filing Thursday that the criminal probe is “a document dispute that has spiraled out of control” and a misguided response to his reclassifying of presidential records before he left office in January 2021.
The ex-president’s legal team urged the 11th U.S, Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta to find that a Florida federal judge properly granted Trump’s request for an outside expert to review the documents — a process that is already well underway.
The Justice Department has challenged the appointment of the special master, saying it was legally unsound and unnecessarily disrupted a criminal probe that the government described as a matter of national security.
The special master, U.S. District Senior Judge Raymond Dearie, already has begun making recommendations about which of the thousands of seized materials should be off limits to investigators because they’re privileged or personal.
Trump’s lawyers argued Thursday he alone has authority to designate records under the Presidential Records Act.
“By executing a search warrant at President Trump’s residence and seizing thousands of pages of documents, the government wholly disregarded the deference accorded to a President under the PRA,” according to the filing. “The PRA authorizes the president alone to designate records as either presidential or personal.”
The appeals court previously ruled in the government’s favor on a key dispute with Trump, by allowing investigators to use in their probe about 100 documents with classified markings that were seized from Trump’s home.
