A federal appeals court in Atlanta on Thursday rejected former U.S. President Donald Trump’s request for an outside review of the FBI’s seizure of classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago mansion in August.
Thus, the judges unanimously ruled that a lower court could not limit the Justice Department’s investigation by accepting Trump’s request to block investigators’ access to the records, as well as in the decision to appoint a special expert for the evaluation.
«The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after execution of the warrant,» the court has noted, CBS reports.
«Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our jurisprudence limiting federal court involvement in criminal investigations,» it has added.
This conclusion — along the lines of the Supreme Court’s mid-October ruling — allows the Justice Department to resume use of the materials seized as part of the investigation into whether Trump broke the rules on classified documents and whether he obstructed justice, since use of the materials had been suspended while the review was underway.
During brief arguments before the Atlanta Court of Appeals last week, the three judges — appointed by the Republican Party — suggested that Trump and his legal team wanted special treatment that would not have been granted to any other American by allowing him the opportunity to challenge the search warrant executed at his home long before charges were filed, reports DPA.
In this regard, the former US president’s lawyers have failed to prove that the government abused its authority in searching his property, while the court has rejected Trump’s claims that the documents could be protected as personal under the Presidential Records Act.
«As we have said, a document’s status as personal or presidential does not alter the Government’s authority to seize it under a warrant supported by probable cause,» the judges have indicated, noting that judicial intervention is normally sought when the seized items «unequivocally pertain to the subject of a search,» reports ‘The Hill’.
The FBI took eleven batches of classified documents during the search in August at the mansion that Trump has in Florida, under a warrant that empowered agents to seize allegedly classified documents. The former president claimed that he himself declassified the suspicious documents.
Since the search of his lavish Florida estate in early August, Trump has been insinuating that the Justice Department planted incriminating evidence against him and has insisted on the need for the independent third party, Judge Raymond J. Dearie, to review the seized information.
