Trump Asks Judge to Keep Blocking F.B.I. From
Working With Seized Classified Files
It was the latest salvo in a court fight over a special master, which has stalled an investigation into the former president’s hoarding of government documents.
...the former president’s legal team argued that documents marked as classified should remain off limits to the F.B.I. and prosecutors. They asked the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, to maintain her order barring agents from using any of the materials taken from his estate until an outside arbiter, known as a special master, has vetted all of them.
The 21-page filing was an aggressive rebuke of the Justice Department’s broader inquiry into whether Mr. Trump or his aides illegally kept national security secrets at his property, Mar-a-Lago, or obstructed the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve the materials. It played down the criminal inquiry as a “storage dispute” and insinuated that officials might have leaked information about the contents of the files.
...“In what at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control, the government wrongfully seeks to criminalize the possession by the 45th president of his own presidential and personal records.”
The filing...underscored how 45th has succeeded for now in using what amounts to a procedural sideshow to stall the criminal investigation, even after his representatives falsely said in June that his office had returned any documents marked as classified in his possession.
Prosecutors had asked Judge Loose Cannon last week to let investigators resume working with about 100 documents marked as classified that formed a small portion of the nearly 13,000 items the F.B.I. seized during a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8.
I don't get how another judge can even temporarily prohibit use of a first judge's approved seized material.
...on Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers [said]...that only a “brief pause” would be required for the special master’s review to be completed. (On Friday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers indicated that they expected the review to take three months.)