Appeals Court Scraps Special Master Review in Trump Documents Case
The panel’s decision removed a major obstacle that had hindered the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive government documents.
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In a strongly worded ruling, the three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit shut down an independent review of thousands of documents seized this summer from Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida. That move allowed the government to pursue its inquiry into whether Mr. Trump illegally kept national security records at his Mar-a-Lago home and obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them.
The unanimous but unsigned 21-page ruling was sharply critical of Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s decision in September to intervene in the case, saying she never had jurisdiction to do so.
“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our case law limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
For more than two months, the review had hindered the criminal inquiry into Mr. Trump’s handling of more than 11,000 documents and photographs...
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Notably, the order on Thursday was handed down by a panel composed of three Republican judges — two of them, Andrew L. Brasher and Britt Grant, put on the bench by Trump himself...
The ruling was an embarrassing development for Judge Cannon, a young jurist. She had not yet served two years on the bench when, in September, she shocked legal experts — and the government — by temporarily barring the Justice Department from using any of the seized materials in its investigation of Mr. Trump and installing an independent arbiter, known as a special master, to review them.
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...the appellate panel — which included the same two Trump-appointed judges who issued the ruling on Thursday — indicated that Judge Cannon had committed a basic error and should not have gotten involved in the case at all.
