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U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has rejected a request from former President Donald Trump for a third party “special master” to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into classified records found at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
“Cannon, an appointee of the former president, affirmed an appeals court’s decision on Monday that she lacked jurisdiction to appoint a special master to oversee documents taken from his estate and lifted an injunction that blocked investigators from using them in a criminal investigation in the meantime,” the Washington Examiner reported.
“By dismissing the lawsuit, titled Trump v. United States, all scheduled hearings over the dispute in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida are canceled, and all pending motions are “denied as moot,” according to a court order. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that Cannon never had the jurisdiction to assign U.S. District Senior Judge Raymond Dearie, a semiretired jurist based in Brooklyn, to serve the role of the special master,” the report added.
“We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant,” Judge William Pryor, an appointee of George W. Bush, wrote for a unanimous panel ruling. “Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
IT'S OFFICIAL: Judge Cannon has dismissed Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago lawsuit on instructions from the appeals court. pic.twitter.com/8rtgMu0GC0
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) December 12, 2022
In late October, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an emergency request from Trump to intervene in the dispute over classified documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago in August.
“The former president was seeking an order to return about 100 documents with classification markings to a review process a “special master” is conducting of more than 10,000 documents the FBI took during the Aug. 8 search of Trump’s home,” Politico reported.
“But no member of the court publicly signaled a willingness to grant emergency relief for Trump. The court also offered no explanation or rationale for declining Trump’s request, which would have allowed his attorneys the ability to review the most sensitive records the FBI obtained during their ongoing probe,” the outlet added.
An FBI supervisory special agent filed a revised document in federal court altering the number of documents that the bureau seized from former President Donald Trump during an unprecedented raid on his home in Palm Beach, Fla., in August.
“The additional review and recount resulted in some minor revisions to the Detailed Property Inventory,” noted the agent, whose name was redacted. “I and FBI personnel working under my direction conducted an additional review and recount of the Seized materials in order to make this declaration.”
According to The Epoch Times, the supervisory agent’s filing acknowledged that the bureau actually obtained 63 more documents or photos than previously revealed:
The revised inventory was submitted to the federal court in southern Florida on orders from U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, a Reagan appointee who was inserted into the case as a special master, or an independent third party to handle disputes and other matters.
Dearie ordered a government official “with sufficient knowledge of the matter” to submit a declaration or affidavit stating whether the detailed property inventory released on Sept. 2 “represents the full and accurate extent of the property seized from” Trump’s home in August when FBI agents executed a search warrant there.
The supervisory agent noted in the filing that he or she leads a squad of FBI agents and intelligence analysts conducting investigations into the potential mishandling of classified or national security information.
Previously, the FBI claimed that agents removed 33 boxes of information and documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
