The appeals court suspends the judge’s order that denied access to the US government
A US appeals court ruled Wednesday that the Department of Justice may continue to have access to confidential documents seized by the FBI at the residence of former President Donald Trump in Mar-a-lago, Florida, so not only will the designated independent expert, Raymond Dearie, have access to them.
A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals, which covers the states of Alabama, Florida and Georgia, stayed the order issued by US District Judge Aileen Cannon, which, in a trial court, had denied to the Department of Justice a motion to continue reviewing and investigating material seized at the Trump residence. “It is clear that the public has a vested interest in ensuring that the storage of classified records does not result in exceptionally serious harm to national security,” the three-judge panel said.
On September 15, Cannon appointed federal judge Raymond Dearie, former chief magistrate of the Brooklyn-based district court, as solely responsible for the review of approximately 100 documents marked as classified, as well as the documents physically attached to them.
This Tuesday, the Justice Department filed an urgent motion in the 11th Circuit of Appeals regarding the use of the 100 documents marked as classified that had been seized at Mar-a-Lago by the FBI last August 9. In their appeal to this Atlanta-based court, Justice Department attorneys argued that Cannon’s order “harms” their criminal investigation and irreparably harms the government by blocking “critical steps in an ongoing criminal investigation and forcing the disclosure of highly sensitive records,” according to a legal document released today.
In the framework of an open investigation of Trump, FBI agents searched the former president’s offices in Mar-a-Lago (Palm Beach, Florida) and found a significant number of documents, some of them with labels that said “top secret”, “secret” or “classified”. The former Republican president (2017-2021) responded by suing the Government in the Palm Beach courts. The case fell to Aileen Cannon, a judge born in Colombia and appointed precisely by Trump when I was in the White House. Cannon’s decision to accept the appointment of an independent expert to review the documents found in Mar-a-Lago, as requested by Trump, generated numerous criticisms. This fact has been questioned by legal experts who consider that this will temporarily delay the Government’s criminal investigation.
The Justice Department had requested that it be allowed to review only the documents marked as classified and that Dearie’s review exclude them. The idea of appointing an independent expert, which was accepted by Cannon, came from Trump’s lawyers with the declared purpose of giving “confidence” to the investigation into the transfer of official documents to Mar-a-Lago, a hundred which is of a “classified” nature according to the Attorney General’s Office.