Former President Donald Trump has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s decision to allow the FBI and Department of Justice to keep what they claim are classified documents from the hands of a special master named to go through the material taken in the unprecedented raid on Mar-a-Lago.
The Eleventh District Court of Appeals gave the FBI and DOJ permission to keep the disputed “classified” documents and not turn them over to the special master, retired judge Raymond Dearie. Dearie was tasked by a Florida federal judge with going through the documents confiscated from the former president’s home to determine their rightful provenance and determine if it was okay for Trump to possess them. An Eleventh Circuit judge initially said the federal agencies could not silo off the documents from the special master, a former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge. But the court reversed that ruling in late September.
Judge Dearie oversaw some of the most sensitive counter-terrorism documents and was also lied to by the FBI regarding the Trump-Russia Collusion documents, so it’s not like he doesn’t have the proper clearances to view the seized documents.
Related: BOMBSHELL: FBI Unit Responsible for Raid on Mar-a-Lago Also Behind Russiagate Hoax
Trump’s 300-page document filed today asks the Supreme Court justices to put the brakes on the Eleventh Circuit ruling:
[T]he Eleventh Circuit granted a stay of the Special Master Order, effectively compromising the integrity of the well-established policy against piecemeal appellate review and ignoring the District Court’s broad discretion without justification. This unwarranted stay should be vacated as it impairs substantially the ongoing, time-sensitive work of the Special Master.
The Trump camp has asked that the special master be given until January to finish his work; the Justice Department wants him to finish quickly so that an investigation into Trump can wrap up before the election.
Trump claims the Mar-a-Lago documents had been declassified while he was president.
The appeal to the Supreme Court now invites the nation’s highest court to wade into the historically anomalous raid of a former president’s home.
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