Update: At a hearing Thursday, a federal judge "appeared to give a boost" to the Trump legal team's request for a special master, as the AP puts it. Though the judge said she would issue a ruling later, she pondered, "Ultimately, what is the harm" in appointing an outside legal expert to review the documents seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago. She continued, per Reuters, "What I'm wondering from the government—what is the harm beyond delaying the investigation?" Our original story from Thursday follows:
The back-and-forth between former President Trump's legal team and the Department of Justice continued Wednesday, with a court filing from the Trump side responding to the DOJ's Tuesday filing alleging obstruction by Trump's team. Trump's lawyers said in their Wednesday response that it should have been no surprise classified documents were found back in January among 15 boxes of presidential records Trump turned over from Mar-a-Lago, and that the discovery of those documents should not have led to the recent FBI raid of Trump's residence there, CNN reports. The court filings are related to the Trump team's request that a "special master" be appointed to review the documents seized during the raid. Both sides will air their arguments on the matter at a court hearing Thursday, ABC News reports.
"The purported justification for the initiation of this criminal probe was the alleged discovery of sensitive information contained within the 15 boxes of Presidential records," the attorneys wrote. "But this 'discovery' was to be fully anticipated given the very nature of Presidential records. Simply put, the notion that Presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been cause for alarm." Rather than referring the matter to the DOJ for a criminal probe, they wrote, the National Archives should have simply attempted to recover the presidential records. They further write, per CNBC, that the DOJ is twisting "the framework of responding to a motion for a Special Master into an all-encompassing challenge to any judicial consideration, presently or in the future, of any aspect of its unprecedented behavior in this investigation."
story continues below
Trump himself addressed the issue on Truth Social, writing of the DOJ's pictures of the documents released this week, "Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!) and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see. Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!" As CNN notes, however, only the cover pages are shown in the FBI pictures, and no evidence has so far been put forth that the documents were actually declassified. Trump also wrote that agents "took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them. They dropped them, not me - Very deceiving." (The AP explains how the obstruction issue "could pose the most direct legal threat to Trump or those in his orbit" so far.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
