Federal Court Sets Deadline for Trump's Response to DOJ’s Request on Mar-a-Lago Secret Docs

Last month, former US President Donald Trump condemned the August 8th Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence as a weaponization of the country’s justice system against him by the Biden administration.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia has announced that they are giving former Donald Trump’s attorneys until noon on Tuesday to respond to a Department of Justice (DOJ) motion to go ahead with using classified documents seized by the FBI from the former US president’s Mar-a-Lago home last month.

The announcement comes after the DOJ asked the federal appeals court to override Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling on Friday, which bars the feds from reviewing Mar-a-Lago documents, claiming that delaying the probe any longer could cause “irreparable harm” to the nation.

“[The] criminal investigation is itself essential to the government’s effort to identify and mitigate potential national security risks,” the DOJ appeal reads.

The appeal reiterated the agency’s previous allegations of potential criminal wrongdoing by Trump, arguing that “the record makes clear that the materials were stored in an unsecure manner over a prolonged period.”

The DOJ also accused Judge Cannon of “fundamentally erring” with her decision to appoint a special master in the Mar-a-Lago case and to grant an injunction in the Trump probe, arguing that the ruling “impedes the government’s efforts to protect the nation’s security.”

According to the DOJ, any considerations of claims for return of property or executive privilege were “categorically inapplicable to the records bearing classification markings.”

“Plaintiff has no claim for the return of those records, which belong to the government and were seized in a court-authorized search,” the appeal pointed out.

This followed Cannon denying on Thursday the DOJ’s request to allow the FBI to continue to use classified Mar­-a-Lago records and simultaneously appointing US District Judge Raymond J. Dearie as a special master in the case.

78-year-old Dearie, one of two jurists earlier suggested by Trump's legal team, has been granted the authority to determine if any of the 11,000 pages of the Mar-a-Lago papers should be excluded from the probe on the grounds of attorney-client privilege or executive privilege. This is something that is granted to members of the executive branch, allowing them to maintain confidential communications and resist certain forms of oversight by the judicial and legislative branches of government.

Dearie, who summoned the parties in the case for a preliminary conference in Brooklyn, New York City on Tuesday, has until November 30th to complete his job – six weeks longer than the DOJ argued he should have.

Shortly after the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, reports claimed that the bureau’s search was focused on the documents that the ex­-POTUS had taken from the White House at the end of his term, rather than surrendering them to the US National Archives in line with the Presidential Records Act.

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the matter, slamming the “unannounced raid” on his home as “not necessary or appropriate." He dubbed the FBI’s actions “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for president in 2024.”