Former US President, Donald Trump, was yesterday dealt a heavy blow after the United States appealed to the court to end an independent review of documents seized from the former president’s Florida home and giving permission for all of the records to be used in a criminal investigation against him.
Africa Today News, New York reports that in a unanimous decision reached on Thursday, the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled in favour of the Justice Department in its challenge to District Judge Aileen Cannon’s September decision to name a ‘special master’ to review the records to decide if some should be kept from investigators.
The three-judge panel disclosed that Cannon, a Florida-based judge appointed by Trump, lacked the authority to grant the former president’s request for a special master, made in a lawsuit he filed in August, two weeks after FBI agents carried out a court-approved search at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.
Read Also: Donald Trump’s Account Reappears On Twitter Following
It also overturned Cannon’s decision to bar investigators from accessing most of the records pending the review and threw out Trump’s suit.
Trump faces a federal criminal investigation into his retention of sensitive government records after leaving office in January 2021, including whether he violated the 1917 Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to release information harmful to national security.
Investigators also are looking into potential unlawful obstruction of the probe.
Africa Today News, New York reports that FBI agents seized about 11,000 records, including about 100 marked as classified, during the search.
The 11th Circuit said that while a search warrant for a former president’s property is ‘extraordinary’, it did not give ‘the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation’.
The court also said Trump did not prove there was a “callous disregard” for his constitutional rights in the search of his property, one of the few reasons a court can intervene in an ongoing investigation.
‘The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant,’ the panel wrote.
‘Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.’
The 11th Circuit panel consisted of Judge William Pryor, appointed by Republican former President George W Bush, as well as two of Trump’s own appointees, Judges Andrew Brasher and Britt Grant.
Trump is likely to appeal the 11th Circuit’s decision to the conservative-majority US Supreme Court. The 11th Circuit said its order will not take effect for seven days, during which time the former president could seek to challenge it.