The DOJ has appealed to the 11th Circuit after its request for a “carve out” of classified documents removed by search warrant from Mar-a-Lago for review by a special master was denied.
Mar-a-Lago DocsThe US Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to immediately step into the fight over documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and allow investigators to resume using documents with classified markings in a criminal probe.
The government’s petition to the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday night was expected after a federal judge denied its request to carve out from review by a neutral third party about 100 documents with classified markings. Justice Department lawyers contend these documents are critical to the investigation into whether sensitive government records were mishandled.
“The district court has entered an unprecedented order enjoining the Executive Branch’s use of its own highly classified records in a criminal investigation with direct implications for national security,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in the appeals court brief.
The lawyers urged the appeals court to act “as soon as practicable.”
A US Department of Justice filing says White House records held in a storage room at Donald Trump’s Florida home may have been concealed or removed before an FBI June search, suggesting possible attempts to obstruct the investigation. Bloomberg Government’s Jack Fitzpatrick has more on Bloomberg Television.Source: Bloomberg
The Justice Department repeated many of the same arguments it made from the start opposing Trump’s effort to claim a legal interest in the fate of seized government records as an ex-president and maintaining that it had an appropriate system for identifying any documents that might be shielded by privilege or any personal belongings.The government argued that the judge in Florida was wrong to give weight to the notion that Trump might have declassified materials or designated certain presidential records as personal ones. They wrote that notwithstanding Trump’s sweeping public statements about declassifying information, his lawyers hadn’t made that representation in court, and that federal law wouldn’t allow sensitive national security information to be categorized as personal.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon issued an order late Thursday appointing New York federal judge Raymond Dearie as an outside special master to review all of the more than 11,000 documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago last month.
Cannon had blocked the government from using any of the seized materials in its criminal investigation during the special master’s review. Officials previously told the judge that they would ask the appeals court to step in if she refused to lift that order for the collection of documents that appeared to have classification status.
It wasn’t immediately clear which 11th Circuit judges will hear the Justice Department’s case.
We will now see how high up the rot goes.Report
And we note that his lawyers won’t actually provide a non-existing list of supposedly declassified materials. I suspect they don’t actually want to be disbarred but are angling to get this appealed to SCOTUS.Report
He didn’t know what he had.Report
There have been stories told that the standard arrangement was, if Trump takes it up to the residential part of the WH, or orders it taken there, it was supposed to be automatically declassified. There’s still a chance that they’ll try to hang it on the staffers who didn’t follow through with the paperwork for that.Report
The classification discussion is one issue. Problem for trump is he s to lol had thousands of pages of government documents he wasn’t supposed to have, and at one point his lawyers lied in his behalf about giving it back. The alleged standing order doesn’t impact that one iota.Report
One of the things that I learned back in 2016 was the term “non-paper”.
It’s apparently a term of art for taking a classified document and turning it into an unclassified document.
Like, paper markings on a document are something like:
(U) This is a paragraph about stuff that is unclassified.
(S) This is a paragraph about the lizard people.
(U) This is a paragraph about stuff that is unclassified.
You can take that document, remove the part in the middle, and, tah-dah, you’ve got an unclassified document!
That’s a sort of “automatic declassification” that makes sense to me.
Was he just saying “anything that makes it to my part of the house, even if it’s about the lizard people, is now unclassified”?
If it’s that, I would have appreciated more information about the lizard people coming out officially.
Hey, could we make a FOIA request of the paperwork now that it’s unclassified?Report
Was he just saying “anything that makes it to my part of the house, even if it’s about the lizard people, is now unclassified”?
Those are some of the stories. That if it was taken to the residence, the entire document contents were declassified. My meager understanding is that in such a case, word should have been sent to some responsible keeper who would take note of the fact that lizard people were no longer classified info and it would propagate from there. Or perhaps that the existence of the lizard people was no longer classified, but the size of their nuclear arsenal was still.Report
The Eleventh Circuit (two Trump appointees on the panel) granted DOJ’s request, not too subtly smacking down Trump’s lawyers’ and, by implication, the trial court judge.Report