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Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Fed Court Restore FBI Search Of Mar-a-Lago!

He gonna take it to the Supreme Court.

The U.S. 11th District Court of Appeals granted the Justice Department its duty to continue a possible criminal probe into Washed Up 45 holding onto top secret and classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The National Archives and Records Administration warned the former president that he was required to all properties of the U.S. government.

The FBI was stopped by one of the former president's appointed judges. Her inexperience gave the former president a little breathing room. However this special master is not playing games. He needs to know what information did the former president declassify before he left office. His lawyers are not telling.

A three-judge panel agreed to put on hold a lower court's order that kept the subset of sensitive records off-limits for the Justice Department to use for investigative purposes, pending the review of the materials by an independent arbiter known as a special master.

In its 29-page opinion, the panel said it agreed with the Justice Department that the federal district court in South Florida likely erred in blocking investigators' use of the classified records and then requiring them to submit the sensitive documents to the outside arbiter for review.

"For our part, we cannot discern why [Trump] would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings," Judges Robin Rosenbaum, Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher said. "Classified documents are marked to show they are classified, for instance, with their classification level."

The former president, the judges continued, "has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents." The judges also said there is no evidence in the record before them that the roughly 100 documents at issue were declassified.

"In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal," the three-judge panel wrote. "So even if we assumed that [Trump] did declassify some or all of the documents, that would not explain why he has a personal interest in them."

Grant and Brasher were appointed to the 11th Circuit by the former president, while Rosenbaum was tapped by former President Barack Obama.

Federal prosecutors asked the 11th Circuit to step in last week after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed by Washed Up 45 in 2020, denied their request to restore access to the batch of records marked classified, which were among the 11,000 documents seized in the Aug. 8 search. 

In their appeal to the Atlanta-based court, Justice Department lawyers argued Cannon's order "hamstrings" its criminal probe and irreparably harms the government by blocking "critical steps of an ongoing criminal investigation and compelling disclosure of highly sensitive records," including to Washed Up 45's lawyers. They also warned Cannon's temporary ban keeping investigators from using the materials for investigative purposes "impedes the government's efforts to protect the nation's security."

The former president's legal team urged the 11th Circuit to turn down the Justice Department's request to regain access to the sensitive documents, reiterating its characterization of the court fight as a "document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control." The federal probe into the president, his lawyers James Trusty and Christopher Kise told the court, is "unprecedented and misguided."

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