In a legal dispute regarding classified papers discovered on his property at the Mar-a-Lago club in Florida following an FBI search, former US President Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked the US Supreme Court for guidance.
Trump’s legal team also asked the court to overturn a lower court ruling and allow a “independent arbitrator” to review nearly 100 confidential documents discovered on August 8 as part of a search.
Last month, a three-judge court limited the scope of the “independent arbitrator’s” review to a considerably wider range of papers that were not marked as classified.
In a ruling in favour of the former president, a US judge also declined to permit the Department of Justice to resume studying private documents that had been taken by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Florida home as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
Judge Raymond Deere, a senior district court judge, has also been assigned by Federal District Judge Eileen Cannon to assess documents that the FBI has taken for information that might be covered by a lien to keep it out of the hands of federal investigators.
If Cannon rejects her claim, the Ministry of Justice has pledged to appeal the matter to the Court of Appeals.
Additionally, it attempted to stop Deere, an impartial arbitrator, from reviewing approximately 100 classified documents out of 11,000 discovered during a court-authorized search of Trump’s home on August 8.
On September 8, the Justice Department asked the judge to partially relax earlier limits that prevented department investigators from studying all confiscated documents. This will allow them to at least continue to review materials that are classified as being in the top secret category.
After he leaves office in January 2021, the Justice Department is looking into Trump’s decision to store some top-secret government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.
Trump requests that the Supreme Court take up the Mar-a-Lago case
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