Donald Trump’s path to the White House in 2024 will undoubtedly be a rocky one, as the liberal left and the Biden administration continues to toss ever-worsening hurdles in his path.
One of the latest losses for the former President comes in the case of his Mar-a-Lago document seizure, and it could open Trump up to further trouble.
A unanimous federal appeals court on Thursday ended an independent review of documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, removing a hurdle the Justice Department said had delayed its criminal investigation into the retention of top-secret government information.
The decision by the three-judge panel represents a significant win for federal prosecutors, clearing the way for them to use as part of their investigation the entire tranche of documents seized during an Aug. 8 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. It also amounts to a sharp repudiation of arguments by Trump’s lawyers, who for months had said that the former president was entitled to have a so-called “special master” conduct a neutral review of the thousands of documents taken from the property.
This wasn’t much of a surprise.
The ruling from the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit had been expected given the skeptical questions the judges directed at a Trump lawyer during arguments last week, and because two of the three judges on the panel had already ruled in favor of the Justice Department in an earlier dispute over the special master.
Without the special master overseeing the documents, Trump and his allies fear that items not covered explicitly in the FBI search warrant could make their way into the investigation.
Trump’s team was not particularly concerned, (at least they weren’t expressing such feelings), stating that the move was “purely procedural”.
