Trump Files Lawsuit Over Mar-a-Lago Search and Seizure
It took a while, but former President Donald Trump has finally filed a legal challenge to the Mar-a-Lago search and seizure by the FBI.
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has asked a federal judge to appoint a “special master” to ensure the Justice Department returns any of his private documents seized during the search of Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago.
Trump is asking for a special master – a third-party attorney – to oversee the review of evidence gathered from the beach club in the criminal probe, and for the judge to pause federal investigators’ work related to the evidence until the review is done, according to a new court filing.
The new lawsuit marks the first legal filing by Trump’s team after FBI agents carried out their search on August 8 and underscores how his legal team has struggled to coalesce around a singular strategy. It has been assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020.
In the suit, Trump argues his constitutional rights were violated and that there may have been privileged materials seized.
Though the legal maneuver could slow down the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation, Trump’s request to the federal court in South Florida could face an uphill legal battle after his team missed multiple opportunities to challenge the search.
“The Aug. 8 search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was authorized by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause. The Department is aware of this evening’s motion. The United States will file its response in court,” Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said in response to the new filing.
The ex-President’s lawyers declined to take a position in court in the immediate aftermath of the search warrant execution. They also did not weigh in on whether the search warrant affidavit should be made public before or during a court hearing last week in West Palm Beach, Florida, even though one of his attorneys was present.
Trump, in the new filing, also asks for a more detailed receipt of what was removed from Mar-a-Lago. That request, if granted, would add to the two receipts the FBI already provided to Trump’s team describing 33 items seized, and which his attorney signed off on at the end of the search.
The Justice Department removed 11 sets of classified documents from Trump’s home, according to documents unsealed by a judge last week. The inventory shows that some of the materials recovered were marked as “top secret/SCI,” which is one of the highest levels of classification.
The department has already signaled that it is using an internal filter team to review the seized items, to separate material that could be subject to privilege claims. For instance, investigators mentioned the work of a filter team when they returned to Trump private documents that wouldn’t be part of the investigation, such as two expired passports and his diplomatic passport.
The Justice Department, in court documents, said it believed the evidence it collected at Mar-a-Lago will support its criminal investigation into the mishandling of federal records, including national defense material, after Trump’s team took boxes of records to Florida when he left office. The investigation is also looking at potential obstruction of justice in the investigation.
Read the Trump lawsuit over the Mar-a-Lago search and seizure for yourself here:
gov.uscourts.flsd.618763.1.0
It’s all he knows. Sue until the other guys gives up. Unfortunately the other guy here has deeper pockets and way more lawyers.Report
Statements from the Trumpists should be regarded like statements from the old Soviet Union, where they would issue bizarrely and self-evidently false statements of fact which anyone could see as absurd.
The intent wasn’t to persuade, but to obfuscate and confuse, and provide their defenders with some talking points.Report
I have to assume that any lawyer working for Trump now has insisted on a substantial cash retainer. Of course there are morons no one has ever heard of who are too stupid to do this, which partly explains why no one has ever heard of them.Report
So, to explain things for everyone: Trump basically just admitted to felonies.
He’s claiming, and I’d copy from the PDF except the copy doesn’t work, that some of the information is communication between the president and his staff, and that, correctly, the courts have held that such information is privileged. He’s correct, there.
But, and this needs to be made incredibly clear: Privileged presidential communications are the property of the US government. All of them. That is part of the definition of presidential privilege. They’re not the president’s private property, they’re the US government’s ‘private property’…which is why Biden can possibly waive privilege, but, that’s not important.
The important thing is that they are property of the US government, they get handed over to the National Archives, which will go through them and put some of the records and then, generally, hands some of them over to a presidential library…but they are, and will always remain, the property of the US government.
Trump, literally, is standing there asserting that he wants a special master to go through the seized files to _find documents he literally physically stole_ from the US government. (And he thinks he…gets them back?)
Like, forget any classification or security stuff…you just can’t randomly walk off with US government property.
You want to know why a lawyer wouldn’t sign onto that thing? There you go.Report
The lawsuit hilarious almost notices this. It points out that there are rules about seizing ‘this type’ of communications, but has to give lawyers as examples.
You’d think at some point there would have been a lawsuit about seizing privileged documents from a president, after all, we had a pretty famous incident of the Congress trying to seize an audio tape from Nixon and literally impeaching him because he wouldn’t hand it over. (Seriously, that was the actual impeachment trigger, for people who weren’t alive.)
So I guess he never handed it over? Oh, wait, no, it was literally property of the US government and thus no one needed to ‘hand it over’ once he was no longer president. It went to the National Archives like everything else.
The US government has never had to issue a search warrant for privileged communications because that is actual complete nonsense as a thing to happen…all presidental privileged communications _is_ the US government’s property.Report
Maybe he should have just deleted the documents. It worked for Clinton!Report
Clinton was smart enough to use her own property.
Trump, if he knew how to use email, would probably have walked into the White House server room and tried to walk off with their servers on the way out.Report
Just so we’re clear what the Charlie Brown cartoon looks like, it looks like this:
FBI Raid Trump because he has Top Secret materials he’s providing to Putin
– He’s going to be executed for espionage
… Proof of his secret Jan 6 coup plotting
– He’s going to be executed for treason
… Nuclear secrets he’s selling to the Saudi’s
– He’s going Prison for LIFE
… Secret Dossiers on Foreign Leaders (mostly just pics of the Fin Premier)
– He’s going to Prison
… Secret Materials that could harm America if made public – Aliens, JFK, GRRM’s secret draft ending
– He’s going to Prison
…
…
… His handwritten notebooks
– The National Archives want their stuff back
And the thing is, I agree with you… those are the rules and Presidential communications are Public Records for which there are processes for dissemination over time. And if that’s the case, he’s totally guilty of that and we should insist that Presidents abide by the rules… so take the documents, do what they do, then return them to him for use in the Presidential Library – he’ll either never build or scam his way into some sort of Trump Mahal – but he’s not going to prison for that.
Just so we’re clear, that’s what the Charlie Brown analogy looks like.
Now… since none of us know what were in those boxes, I’ll happily leave room for serious malfeasance or malicious intent or self-incrimination (heck, my initial thought was tax related… but seems to be purely presidential related).
My comment here is on the steady multi-panel thread of how the matter is being walked down to what might actually be an aggressive kinetic action on behalf of Librarians and Historians everywhere. And I *support* that.Report
So would it be fair to characterize your comment as saying that yes, he is guilty of crimes, but American judicial system is so corrupt in favor of the rich and powerful that he will be able to skate with impunity?Report
Wait, are you implying that the American judicial system is *NOT* corrupt in favor of the rich and powerful?
(Is that how we do this?)Report
Sure, if you’re talking to a bunch of college sophomores..Report
Oh, well then.
I’ll let you get back to your question asking Marchmaine about how to best characterize his question.Report
I think my comment is pretty clear that it depends what the documents are and what the government is searching for.
We don’t know what that is… but if it isn’t Putin, Saudi Arabia, Coup, or Aliens and it’s enforcing a document mishandling subpoena then I expect he’ll get the full “Sandy Berger” and deserve it.Report
This what I’m probing.
How would you characterize the “Sandy Berger”, as opposed to the “Reality Winner”?
Is it fair to say that if Trump is guilty of a crime, the just outcome would be the “Reality Winner” while the unjust outcome would be the “Sandy Berger”?Report
Sandy Berger snuck stuff out. Didn’t share it with anybody.
Reality Winner snuck stuff out. Shared it with somebody.
That’s one distinction that appeared to me with a half second of thinking about it. Are there others? I dunno. I have since stopped thinking about it.Report
So if we have evidence of anyone besides Donald Trump going into the closet where the documents were stored, then by this logic he should get the Reality Winner treatment.Report
Oh, is that what happened with Reality Winner? Someone went into her closets to get the info?
I see that you have decided to stop thinking about it as well.Report
Why is that a distinction?
In both cases, documents were viewed by unauthorized persons.Report
Hey, I’m just pleased that neither of us is thinking.Report
Wasn’t it Glen G and his crew that failed to protect her identity leading her get caught? Am i misremembering and also not googling to find out.Report
I think that that’s exactly what happened.
Reality Winner printed out the documents and sent them to Greenwald and then Greenwald wrote her bosses and asked “are these documents legit?” then there were a whole bunch of news articles about how printers have hidden yellow dots that have all sorts of metadata on any given printed document.Report
Coming This Fall: The worlds worst reboot of Tinker, Tailor:
GEORGE SMILEY: Bill Haydon, you are accused of stealing secret documents and giving them to the Russians!
BILL HAYDON: Nonsense! I merely stole the documents and stashed them in my storage shed. And as the video clearly shows, it was over the next few days when various unknown individuals went in and out of the shed. I’m totally innocent!
GEORGE SMILEY: *Clenches fist in frustration* Damn! Almost had him!Report
If there’s going to be a spectacle he needs to end up in prison at the end of it. If he is not going to end up in prison then the spectacle will be… Trump doesn’t go to prison….again! Which is not something anyone who doesn’t want a whole heaping lot more Trump should be interested in facilitating.Report
Yeah, I remember the first day when Popehat pointed out that there’s no way this isn’t related to a really serious underlying charge — and that to me seemed(s) reasonable, right?
But the intervening days have seen some walking back on that assumption – which I think DavidTC makes a really good example of – it’s very important that we preserve our Internal Govt. communications. I un-ironically agree.
I also un-ironically agree with simply raiding Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the documents that had previously been subpoenaed – as we’ve been told. I might just say that we’re raiding to get our stuff back because that’s the policy and we don’t care who you are once you leave office.
But to your point, my gut is still with Popehat… I mean, if you’re not saying it’s a Document Retention Op by alternate methods.. then there had best be a Putin or a Saudi or a Jan 6 or Alien (that would be awkward) angle to all this.Report
I am inclined to agree. DavidTC is totally correct on the legality of the whole matter but I just don’t see Garland and the DoJ signing off on the spectacle of a raid only to enforce the principles DavidTC is laying out. The timeline as I understand it is:
-The Archives were working to obtain return of all the documentation and Trump was delaying, obfuscating and stonewalling. Some boxes were returned, some were not.
-As matters escalated the National Archives sent some relatively important folks down to specifically ask about the docs.
-In this process said folks got a more specific idea of what was in this trove of docs and where they were being stored.
-The nature of the documents and the extremely unsecure manner of their storage then led the DoJ to seek and obtain a warrant to raid the place to get all the docs back immediately.
So, presumably, something on the list of documents that were in that basement really spooked the spooks and they felt that the spectacle was worth getting those documents back into secure hands- immediately.Report
That’s how I understand it, too. They were allowing Trump to do his usual ‘huge delays to try to wear the other side out’ nonsense until…they very suddenly weren’t.
This isn’t about ‘We need the National Archive stuff which you took with you for some reason’. This is ‘Oh, crap, we just realized what was in there.’.
—
But the thing that is total nonsense here is this idea that somehow we aren’t allowed to charge Trump with the smaller crimes of *checks DC law* several thousand instances of First Degree Theft. Why not?
And no, other presidents didn’t do this. Other presidents maybe walked off with government records on their own devices and we had to chase them down to get them back. And I don’t know, maybe some of them walked off with pens or trivial things that were government property. Whatever.
But what Trump did by boxing government documents up and taking them with him is just blatantly absurd levels of criminal activity, and we have it pretty much as a fact, admitted to under the legal system. And…somehow we all agree that is ‘not enough crime’ and we must find _more_ crime before anything happens.Report
I’m not saying they’re not allowed to charge Trump with the first degree theft. I’m saying that if they put up this spectacle and, in the end, the only thing they have is the first degree theft then the spectacle was likely not worth the trouble and was a mistake to have caused. Whereas if they can say, for instance, “Documents detailing the disposition of our nuclear forces for the next few years were taken and were sitting in a Florida Basement so we’re throwing the book at Trump” that’s something that even relative right wingers would have trouble saying the raid was unjustified over.Report
that’s something that even relative right wingers would have trouble saying the raid was unjustified over
Oh my sweet summer child.Report
First: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. They will say that regardless.
And also: Since when does ‘whether or not the public says things are justified have anything to do with enforcing the law?’
Watch out, we’re coming dangerously close to admitting that the problem we are facing is that a large amount of the right-wing of the county will erupt into violence if they feel the actions are unjustified.
Which, um, I think warrants a comparison with what happens on the other side, especially considering that the police officers who shot Rayshard Brook were just not charged this week. See, when the left erupts into protests and occasional violence, it’s over actual things that did happen, actual real harm that happened, dead bodies on the ground.
Whereas the right erupts into violence over imaginary things like ‘stolen elections’, so much we are _unwilling_ to do anything real. We’re in a constant state of ‘appeasing the tiger we are locked in with and making no sudden moves’, and yet for some reason we keep talking about how violent the donkey is when we walk up and punch it. We can’t even _get near_ the tiger, maybe that should be the actual concern, despite the fact it has only attacked us once.Report
Of course they will, but we don’t care about the fringers or the loud online morons, we’re worried about the more mushy middle.
And, yeah, I’m gonna say it. When dealing with the probably Republican nominee in 2024 you have to handle the matter with kids gloves. Garland and the DOJ clearly were aware of this otherwise they would have charged in sooner. I very earnestly hope they didn’t cause all this foofaraw over just general government property that Trump undoubtedly stole; for all this trouble they better have the goods.Report
I am not in any manner ‘walking anything back’, Marchmaine.
I am pointing out how moronic Trump’s request is, and that he just filed a legal document claiming there might have been documents that exist under executive privilege in there and he wants someone to sort through them.
Which is akin to filing a document after the police seize a bunch of stuff that you might have some stolen property in there and you’d like it back, thank you very much.
Half the internet seems to be repeating the ‘executive privilege’ and ‘Biden waived it as a vicious attack on Trump’, and the actual reality is that anything that had executive privilege is exactly what Trump _shouldn’t_ have, because that is, in fact, basic theft! Probably grand theft, considering the value of it. It’s literally stolen!
And, no, it’s not a matter of ‘turning things over’…this isn’t some accident, like someone having made government communications with their phone and not turning everything over, or Trump having created government communications at Mar-a-lago and never turned them in. Those are plausible accidents. He, OTOH, sat there and boxed things up in the White House. You don’t leave a job by boxing a bunch of paperwork up from the office! (And a reminded that Trump barely writes anything and could have hardly thought those were _his_ writings.)
Like, the actual premise here, admitted to by Trump himself, is that he stole a bunch of documents from the White House. (OH, and refused to give them back when this was explained repeatedly, and then lied about giving them back.) He clearly _knows_ he has government documents in there because he just tried to exert EP over them, and that is intent, right there. He stole things, intentionally.
What stuff he stole exactly we don’t know, and we should find out, but at some point we need to stop turning over Trump crimes and having as the response “Ah, yes, but does this prove he was handing over the nuclear codes to Putin? No? Well, I guess we can’t charge him with anything.”Report
The cherrypicked (Trump appointee) judged that this was filed with has now responded, basically saying “If this has any merit, explain it, because I’m sure not seeing any.”Report
“Yes, Trump did murdered Ivana and everyone around him did help cover it up, and he might have literally confessed to it in a legal document he attested to under oath, but we have absolutely _no_ evidence he did this to keep her from revealing his communications with Puttin, and it’s possible he only killed her in a murderous rage, which is actually a lesser crime, and presidents do it all the time, probably. So this is all a witch hunt with changing goals and a deliberate abuse of the system by the Democrats!”Report
Here’s some discussion from when Clinton did it.Report
At least we can agree that trump should be thrown in jail then.Report
Yes, he should.Report
‘did it’ in the sense that…she didn’t do anything like it? This comments sums everything up there: https://ordinary-times.com/2016/07/04/morning-ed-usa-2016-07-04-m/#comment-1164437
And, years later, we still have nothing there. (1)
There is a rather large difference between ‘occasional reference to a thing that is classified (Which can be literally talking about newspaper articles.) and technically should not be spoken about on the insecure channel we are currently using’ and ‘walking off with boxes and boxes of documents that are not actually yours in what is blatant theft of government property at minimum’.
On top of that somehow Clinton is responsible for _other people_ sending _her_ classified information in email? A reminder: There is literally no different in using government email servers or private email servers as far as classification is concerned. (We went over this _repeatedly_ back then.) Her staff would have presumably sent her the same information had she used a government server, and it would have, literally, been exactly as much a violation of classification!
Following perfect strict classification rules is actually incredibly hard, and so much stuff within the government is classified that it is actually very hard to do your job without talking about it in places you should not, and I agree that people should not be prosecuted for small slips.
That is, again, really really different than ‘Imma gonna physically take all these government documents with me when I leave my job and should no longer have access to them and stick them in an unlocked closet to…uh…browse at my pleasure…?’.
You actually come out of this comparison of arguments looking pretty bad, DD.
1) The actual scandal, as trizzlor points out in that discussion, is that standard practice at the time was to use private email as a way to dodge FOIA requests. But if we go after government officials who attempt to evade FOIA requests we’d have to arrest half of them, and Clinton actually _did_ respond to hers, at least.Report
“‘did it’ in the sense that…she didn’t do anything like it?”
Well, yeah; Trump only took hardcopies.Report
…whereas Hillary did not take anything at all, she purchased and set up an email server with the full knowledge of the government, used that, and then continued to possess it after being in office as opposed to it magically disappearing back into the void.Report
What, no triggeredpost? Surprising.
“somehow Clinton is responsible for _other people_ sending _her_ classified information in email?”
the basic training that anyone who gets access to classified material receives (and has to re-take every year) says that if you get sent something by accident then it’s your responsibility to notify the security team
so
yes, she’s responsible for other people sending her classified information
this is considered one of the basic things that you’re expected to do when you get access to classified informationReport
“Hello? NSA? Yes, someone mentioned a newspaper article talking about drone strikes that are still classified, but I’m not sure if they even know it’s classified or not or are even cleared to know that, as I said they read it in a newspaper so how do I handle staff emailing me classified information that is literal public knowledge and they themselves might not even know is classified because, again, it’s classified?”
*later*
“Yes, hello, NSA? It’s happened again. This time they mentioned in their email that I talked to a foreign leader, which despite being public knowledge and not something we were actually attempting to hide within the State Department, is technically automatically classified. So I guess you have to deal with this again?”
*later*
“So, um, people keep talking about my scheduled events in my own email and even in public, despite the fact that such things are considered sensitive…”Report
I had an appointment cancel on my today. So as proof of my love, I annotated the motion. Well, the first sixteen pages of it, anyway, before I ran out of time and had to leave to meet friends for pub trivia tonight. Enjoy.Report
This is terrific, better than the actual attorneys by far.
You should publicize this, like hold a big press conference right there on the front steps of the Court….yard by Marriot.Report