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A panel of judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled Thursday to revoke the appointment of a special teacher in charge of reviewing thousands of documents seized by the FBI from the Mar-a-Lago property of former President Donald Trump.
That appointment had been one of Trump’s greatest judicial achievements in the legal battle he is having with the current US government in relation to those documents, since the expert was in charge of determining which papers the Executive could access in its investigation and which it could not.
The decision of the panel of three judges, including two appointed by Trump, will enter effective in seven days, without the intervention of the full circuit court or the Supreme Court.
“The law and It’s clear,” the judges found. “ We cannot write a rule that would allow any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the order. Nor can we write a rule that allows only ex-presidents to do so.”
To date, the expert was reviewing the hundred documents marked as classified that were found among the more than 12 ,12 that the FBI seized on August 8 during the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
The warrant effectively eliminates what federal authorities they had described as a major stumbling block in their ongoing criminal investigation into whether Trump illegally withheld highly classified records after leaving office and obstructed government efforts to recover them.
The appellate judges said in a hearing last week that they would likely order an end to the special teacher review. They repeatedly expressed their concern about the fact that US District Judge Aileen Cannon’s appointment of external judge Raymond Dearie in Florida lacked clear precedent.
The The panel was skeptical of the claims by Trump attorney Jim Trusty, who described the search of Trump’s home as “an extraordinary case” that warranted the intervention of an outside arbitrator to review all the materials seized in August.
As part of his job, Dearie was supposed to analyze whether any of the documents that were taken raised issues of privilege, either executive privilege or attorney-client privilege.
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