WASHINGTON (AP) — In a legal victory for former President Donald Trump, a federal judge on Monday granted his request for a special master to review documents seized by the FBI from his Flori…
WASHINGTON — In a legal victory for former President Donald Trump, a federal judge on Monday granted his request for a special master to review documents seized by the FBI from his Florida home and also temporarily halted the Justice Department’s own use of the records for investigative purposes.
The order almost certainly slows the pace of the department’s investigation into the presence of top-secret information at Mar-a-Lago, particularly given the judge’s directive that the Justice Department may not for the moment use any of the seized materials as part of its investigation into the storage of government secrets at the Florida property. That injunction is in place until the yet-to-be-named special master completes his or her work, “or further court order.
“While this is a victory for the former President, it is by no means an overwhelming win for him,” David Weinstein, a Florida criminal defense lawyer and former Justice Department prosecutor, said in an email. “While it is a setback for the government, it is also not a devastating loss for them.” Trump’s lawyers had argued that a special master — usually an outside lawyer or former judge — was necessary to ensure an independent review of records taken during the search and so that any personal information or documents could be filtered out and returned to Trump.
Though Cannon did not order the Justice Department to immediately return any of the seized documents to Trump, she said she found persuasive his lawyers’ arguments that he faced potentially “irreparable injury” by being denied access to records that might be of significant personal interest to him. She said the investigative process had, so far, been “closed off” to him.
The department had also said that Trump was not entitled to the return of any of the presidential records that were taken since he is no longer president and the documents therefore do not belong to him. And personal items that were recovered were commingled with classified information, giving them potential value as evidence, the department has said.
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