Former US President Donald Trump’s legal team filed an emergency appeal in the Supreme Court on Tuesday asking the justices to block part of a lower court ruling allowing the Justice Department to use classified documents the FBI seized during its August 8 raid in Mar-a-Lago in its criminal investigation.
Trump has called on the nation’s highest court to evaluate a tranche of documents seized from his home after the lower court denied any independent review of the allegedly classified papers which he insists it belong to him.
He is trying to overturn the federal appeals court’s recent decision that the documents in question are classified and belong to the government, not the former commander in chief.
Although the Justice Department has claimed some of the papers contain highly sensitive information, Trump maintains that he declassified the materials- even some documents bearing ‘Top Secret’ markings – before leaving the White House.
Trump’s legal team said in the filing that a specially designated judicial official should determine if documents bearing classification markings are in fact classified, arguing that an independent review is needed for 100 documents seized from his home.
The attorneys wrote that any limit on the comprehensive and transparent review of the seized records erodes public confidence in the US system of justice, reiterating that the government objects to a transparent process that provides much-needed oversight in its attempts to criminalize a document management dispute.
If Trump’s emergency appeal is accepted, the seized documents will undergo analysis and will simply return to Special Master Raymond Dearie, who was previously tapped to review the papers, since Trump did not ask the court to reinstate a prior ruling that prevented the DOJ from using the allegedly classified docs as part of a criminal probe into the ex-president’s actions after leaving office.
Although the court itself has no hard deadline for when it must reply to the appeal, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas later ordered the DOJ to respond to Trump’s emergency filing by next Tuesday.
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