On Tuesday (October 11), the Department of Justice requested the Supreme Court throw out former President Donald Trump’s bid to have the court-appointed Special Master review the classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s legal team made the plea for intervention after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals granted the DOJ’s request for a stay, which removed 100 classified documents from the special master’s review and enabled the Justice Department to continue its investigation.
Trump’s motion before the Supreme Court is based on procedural grounds. The former President is arguing that the Appeals Court could not grant the stay to the ruling of a Florida judge.
But in Tuesday’s filing, the DOJ hit back at Trump’s assertions, claiming the former President’s legal team has done very little to justify intervention from the Supreme Court, noting that he’s failed to show how he would be harmed if the Supreme Court didn’t act.
Instead, the DOJ argued that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had the jurisdiction to review the order of a lower court in its entirety, “including the portion directing that a ‘special master shall be appointed to review the seized property.'”
The DOJ details that since Trump doesn’t have “plausible claims of ownership of or privilege in the documents bearing classification markings, he will suffer no harm at all from a temporary stay of the special master’s review of those materials while the government’s appeal proceeds.”
The DOJ’s Tuesday filing also argues that Trump “further undermined any claim that he is suffering irreparable injury from the stay by opposing the government’s motion to expedite the underlying appeal and urging that oral argument be deferred until ‘January 2023 or later.'”
