WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Tuesday evening said that appointing a particular master “is unnecessary and would significantly harm important governmental interests, including national security interests.”
The DOJ tried to bolster its case to the courtroom by together with an FBI picture displaying paperwork and “classified cover sheets recovered from a container” in Trump’s “45 office,” a reference to Trump being the forty fifth president. The picture exhibits paperwork marked “secret” and “top secret” and “SCI” —which stands for extremely categorised “sensitive compartmented information.”
In its late-night courtroom submitting, the Justice Department stated that among the paperwork seized had been so delicate and categorised that FBI brokers and DOJ attorneys wanted extra security clearances to evaluation them.
The submitting got here in response to former President Donald Trump‘s request Aug. 22 — two weeks after the Mar-a-Lago search — for a special master to review the documents seized from his Florida estate.
Justice officials said that the appointment of a special master would impede the government’s ongoing legal investigation.
Such a evaluation of categorised paperwork “would impede the Intelligence Community from conducting its ongoing review of the national security risk that improper storage of these highly sensitive materials may have caused and from identifying measures to rectify or mitigate any damage that improper storage caused,” the DOJ doc states.
The Justice Department stated it couldn’t belief information that got here from Trump’s orbit forward of the Florida search and {that a} consultant for the previous president falsely asserted that categorised paperwork had been turned over to the federal government. The undeniable fact that so many paperwork had been discovered “casts serious doubt” on the Trump group’s declare that there had been “a diligent search” for paperwork aware of the grand jury subpoena in May.
“That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter,” the Justice Department stated in the submitting.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, signaled over the weekend that she was inclined to grant the previous president’s request and appoint a 3rd get together to evaluation the paperwork to make sure they do not include information protected by attorney-client privilege. The Justice Department has stated {that a} authorities filter group that is separate from the investigation had already recognized “a limited set of materials” probably containing privileged information.
In Tuesday evening’s submitting, the Justice Department argued a particular master is pointless as a result of authorities evaluation groups have already completed their work. “It would do little or nothing to protect any legitimate interests that Plaintiff may have while impeding the government’s ongoing criminal investigation,” the DOJ submitting says.
Ahead of Tuesday evening’s submitting, the Justice Department had asked permission to file a response of as much as 40 pages to Trump’s particular master request “in order to adequately address the legal and factual issues raised” by Trump’s authorized group.
The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8 got here after intensive discussions with the National Archives and Justice Department officers over practically 18 months.
A redacted affidavit that laid out possible trigger for the search revealed that the National Archives referred the matter to the FBI after it discovered “a lot of classified records” in 15 bins that Trump turned over to the National Archives earlier this yr. A subsequent FBI evaluation of the bins in May confirmed that 14 of the 15 bins contained paperwork with classification markings. A complete of 184 distinctive paperwork bearing classification markings had been discovered, together with 25 marked “TOP SECRET.”
The FBI was licensed to grab any paperwork with categorised markings, together with the containers the categorised paperwork had been discovered in, together with any authorities or presidential information created throughout Trump’s time in workplace and any “evidence of knowing alteration, destruction, or concealment of any government and/or Presidential Records, or any documents with classification markings.”
Among the paperwork retrieved from Mar-a-Lago had been Roger Stone’s clemency paperwork, information concerning the president of France, and a trove of confidential and categorised paperwork, together with presidential information. FBI brokers seized 26 bins, in addition to a leather-bound field of paperwork containing Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information, in keeping with the property receipt of things recovered.
In a separate filing Tuesday, a number of former federal prosecutors who served throughout Republican administrations — Donald B. Ayer, Gregory A. Brower, John J. Farmer Jr., Stuart M. Gerson, Peter D. Keisler, William F. Weld, and former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman — wrote that “regardless of one’s political views, it is clear that there is no legal support for the relief requested by the former President.”