It seems like ten years ago, but the legal drama surrounding the Department of Justice’s arguably unconstitutional raid on Mar-a-Lago is still being fought. The Justice Department is appealing the Trump motion for a special master, even as that person is reviewing the records seized by FBI agents on August 8. The DOJ tried to make the case that such a delay would constitute a national security risk. Judge Aileen Cannon issued an injunction against the FBI from further investigating the documents and granted the special master motion. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled her, permitting the Justice Department to resume its investigation and excluding some 100 documents marked as classified from review by the special master. The latest front in this legal war is Trump appealing to the Supreme Court, which will surely re-energize his haters (via NYT):
Former President Donald J. Trump asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to intervene in the litigation over sensitive documents that the F.B.I. seized from his Florida estate, saying that an appeals court had lacked jurisdiction to remove them from a special master’s review.
But Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not ask the Supreme Court to overturn the most important part of the appeals court’s intervention: its decision to free the Justice Department to continue using documents with classification markings in its criminal investigation of Mr. Trump’s handling of government records.
The new filing was technical, saying that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, had not been authorized to stay aspects of a judge’s order appointing a special master to review all materials that the F.B.I. had seized in its search of Mr. Trump’s residence, Mar-a-Lago.
“The 11th Circuit lacked jurisdiction to review the special master order, which authorized the review of all materials seized from President Trump’s residence, including documents bearing classification markings,” the application said.
Is this a troll move? It will undoubtedly yank this issue back into the spotlight for a brief period while pouring heat on Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, who are both hated by the Left. Thomas is undoubtedly a jurist that the Trump legal team is hinging on siding with them in this matter. Trump’s legal challenges overall have a mixed record of success. The Supreme Court ordered Trump to turn his tax records to Congress a day after the Mar-a-Lago ransacking. During the 2020 election, Trump’s legal team tasked with challenging some of the results also endured serial defeats in the courtroom.
If this was done to get his name back into the news, it would probably succeed, although the timing is not ideal. The last thing we need right now is to give Democrats something to get energized about—and Trump is a lightning rod in that regard. Then again, this raid was illegal and should be fought by any legal means available.