(Washington) The United States Department of Justice this month completed its review of potentially confidential documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s estate in Florida. He identified “a limited set of documents potentially containing confidential attorney-client information,” according to a court filing Monday.
Posted at 6:18 p.m.
The department’s filing follows a judge’s order over the weekend that she was inclined to grant a request from Mr. Trump’s legal team for a special counsel to review documents seized during the August 8 search at Mar-a-Lago and voids anything that may be covered by claims of legal privilege.
In revealing that the department had completed its review of potentially confidential communications, law enforcement officials appeared to suggest that the appointment of a third-party special counsel may now be questionable. The department relied on a specialized team to screen potentially confidential communications and said Monday it had completed its review of those documents ahead of the judge’s order.
District Judge Aileen Cannon said on Saturday it was her “preliminary intention” to appoint a special counsel – which would be a first procedural victory for Mr Trump’s legal team – but gave the department the opportunity to respond and has scheduled a hearing Thursday to discuss the case.
The judge also ordered the Justice Department to submit under seal a more detailed description of the material that was seized from Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach estate, which the department said Monday it would do.
A broad vision of presidential power
A recently unsealed FBI document on the investigation at Mar-a-Lago not only offers new details about the investigation, but also reveals clues to the arguments former President Donald Trump’s legal team has made. intention to assert.
A May 25 letter from one of his attorneys, attached to the affidavit for the search, advances a broad view of presidential power, saying the commander-in-chief has absolute power to declassify anything he wants – and also that the law governing the handling of US classified information simply does not apply to the president himself.
In the eyes of the Justice Department, the arguments were not compelling enough to prevent an FBI search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate this month. What’s more, the affidavit makes it clear that investigators are focusing on more recent activity — long after Mr. Trump left the White House and lost the legal authority that came with it. Even so, the letter suggests that a defense strategy anchored around presidential powers, a strategy employed during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation when Mr Trump was in fact president, could again be in play. game as the investigation progresses.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Mr. Trump’s legal team is looking for ways to distinguish a former president from other citizens given the penalties imposed over the years for mishandling government secrets, including a nine years in prison for a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who stored two decades of classified documents in his Maryland home.
However, many legal experts doubt that claims of such presidential power hold any weight.
“When someone is no longer president, he is no longer president. That’s the reality of the matter,” said Oona Hathaway, a Yale Law School professor and former attorney at the Department of Defense General Counsel’s Office. “When you left the office, you left the office. You cannot claim that you are not subject to the laws that apply to everyone else. »