A US court has reversed the decision to appoint an independent expert to verify official documents, some of them confidential, taken by the FBI in August at the residence of former US head of state Donald Trump.
The judges of the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit of the United States, which includes the state of Florida, where Trump lives, unanimously accepted on Thursday a request presented in October by the attorney general, the Democrat Marrick Garland.
In September, a lower court granted Trump’s request that an independent expert review official documents taken from the residence, a task that fell to veteran federal judge Raymond Dearie.
According to the decision, made by Aileen Cannon, a judge appointed by the former Republican president (2017-2021) while Trump was in the White House, Dearie would determine which documents could be accessed by prosecutors in the investigation and which were protected by secrecy.
On Thursday, the appeals court ruled that the Aug. 8 searches and seizures were not illegal and that Cannon had no authority to limit the Justice Department’s review of those documents, which is leading the investigation.
At press time, Dearie was reviewing the 100 documents marked confidential that were found among the more than 13,000 official documents the FBI seized during the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
After losing the 2020 election, Trump took whole boxes of documents with him. However, a 1978 law requires any President of the United States to transmit all emails, letters, and other working documents to the US National Archives.
In January, Trump returned 15 boxes. In early August, FBI agents searched the former head of state’s Palm Beach facility, where they found official documents, hundreds of them labeled “top secret,” “secret” or “confidential.”
Federal investigators suspect that the Republican may have violated a spying prevention law, which strictly regulates the possession of confidential documents. Donald Trump guarantees that the documents found in Mar-a-Lago have been declassified.
On November 18, Marrick Garland announced the appointment of a special prosecutor, Jack Smith, who will investigate former President Donald Trump for his possible involvement in the attack on the Capitol, as well as the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
Source: TSF
