The Justice Department is urging the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the appointment of special counsel Raymond Dearie and return the roughly 13,000 documents to investigators looking into whether Trump illegally retained highly sensitive documents involving national defense information after he left office and possibly prevented the government. efforts to recover them. The appeals court previously granted a request by the DOJ to stay parts of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that prevented the government from using about 100 classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago in its investigation and requested that they be turned over to special teacher Dearie. FBI photo of redacted documents and classified covers recovered from a container stored at former US President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, included in a US Department of Justice filing, August 30, 2022. US Department of Justice The Justice Department then quickly filed a motion to end Dearie’s review in its entirety, saying his inability to access the unclassified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago also significantly hindered his ongoing criminal investigation. It’s the first in-person meeting between top department officials and Trump’s legal team since Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith last Friday, which Garland said was justified in part by Trump’s announcement. that he will again run for president in 2024. . Smith has been tasked with overseeing the ongoing criminal investigation into classified records seized from Trump’s estate in August, as well as the separate investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his election loss to President Joe Biden. In a filing Monday afternoon, the Justice Department formally notified the court of Smith’s appointment and said it had reviewed the filings in the DOJ case and that it “concurs with all of the arguments that have been presented on the record and will be discussed at oral argument.” .” Last week, officials said Smith was preparing to return to the US from the Netherlands, where he was serving as the war crimes prosecutor at The Hague. Jack Smith, the head of the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Division, poses for a photo at the Justice Department in Washington, August 24, 2010. Charles Dharapak/AP In a filing last week, department officials accused Trump and his legal team of engaging in “gameplay” in their fight to keep the roughly 13,000 documents in Dearie’s possession, arguing that when he ordered the materials packed into the White House . then moved to Mar-a-Lago, in effect automatically designated as his “personal” files. But at the same time, his lawyers said that if Dearie rejected that argument for some documents, they should have the opportunity to claim they are covered by executive privilege and should be protected by the government. They argued that Trump’s legal team has advanced a “sweeping and untenable theory” to support their claims about the documents under their reading of the Presidential Records Act, saying Trump “appears to be claiming that he can unilaterally ‘consider » otherwise the presidential archives. personal fiat records.” And even if Trump were correct in his claims, the DOJ says, it would amount to a “red herring” in terms of their right to access the documents as part of their ongoing criminal investigation. “Documents combined or stored collectively with classified material located at Plaintiff’s premises were lawfully seized by the FBI under the terms of a court-authorized search warrant because of their relevance to the government’s ongoing investigation,” said the top DOJ counterintelligence official Jay Bratt. . “That relevance exists regardless of whether they were personal documents or government records. Absent a valid and substantiated claim of privilege, all such documents must now be made available to the investigative team.”
