Trump and his team want to prevent the US Department of Justice from investigating classified documents that have been seized from him. “The US government is trying to criminalize a dispute over document management,” the lawyers write in their motion.
At the end of September, the US Department of Justice achieved a major victory in court. The federal court ruled that the investigators could continue to use some of the seized documents for their work. That overturned the decision of a Florida court. It had prohibited the investigators from using the classified documents as long as the independent arbitrator (special master), Raymond Dreerie, was handling the documents.
In early August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The FBI seized several classified documents, some with the highest secrecy status. By law, that material should have been handed over to the National Archives.