The timing of Donald Trump’s rather early 2024 reelection announcement has been seen by some observers as a suave move reeking of political optics, and rightly so.
You see, now that Trump is officially running for the presidency once again, the attacks that he faces both in court and on Capitol Hill will be undeniably imbued with an aura of political malfeasance – something that Trump will likely have no problem leaning into as the probes carry on.
Trump’s latest trouble could fall under this filter as well, with an appeals court now pushing back against some of his assertions regarding documents seized from his home at Mar-a-Lago.
A federal appeals court appeared deeply skeptical Tuesday that former President Donald Trump was entitled to challenge an FBI search of his Florida estate or to have an independent arbiter review documents that were seized from the home.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, including two Trump appointees, repeatedly suggested Trump was seeking special treatment in asking that the “special master” conduct an independent inspection of records taken in the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
“Other than the fact that this involves a former president, everything else about this is indistinguishable from any pre-indictment search warrant,” said William Pryor, the court’s chief judge, a George W. Bush appointee.
And then…
He added: “We’ve got to be concerned about the precedent that we would create that would allow any target of a federal criminal investigation to go into a district court and to have a district court entertain this kind of petition … and interfere with the executive branch’s ongoing investigation.”
Trump has repeatedly insisted that the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago had been declassified by he himself before leaving office, but his lawyers have not yet relied on that claim in court.
