A member of the Secret Service is seen in front of the house of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on August 9, 2022.
Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images
A federal appeals court on Thursday overturned a judge’s decision to appoint a watchdog often called a special master to review hundreds of documents seized by the FBI from the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump as a part of a criminal investigation.
“This appeal requires us to think about whether the district court had jurisdiction to dam the USA from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation,” a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the eleventh Circuit wrote in its ruling.
“The reply isn’t any,” the panel wrote.
All three judges on the panel were put there by Republican presidents. Trump appointed Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher, while Chief Judge Bill Pryor was appointed by George W. Bush.
Their ruling could speed up the pace of the Department of Justice’s investigation of Trump for his removal of documents from the White House and their shipment to his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. By law, those documents — greater than 100 of which were marked confidential, secret or top secret — belong to the federal government.
On Nov. 18, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel for that probe, which can be focused on whether Trump and others obstructed justice within the months that the federal government was attempting to recuperate the records before the raid.
The DOJ had appealed the appointment of the special master, which was done at Trump’s request, in September by Judge Aileen Cannon within the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Cannon was named to the bench by Trump.
Cannon had authorized the special master, Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie of federal court in Brooklyn, Recent York, to review the seized property from Mar-a-Lago for “personal items and documents and potentially privileged material subject to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege.”
Cannon also temporarily blocked the DOJ to review or use the seized documents for its investigation while Dearie’s examination of them was pending.
The DOJ said that order was not justified under the law.
The August 8 raid at Mar-a-Lago was conducted after one other judge signed a search warrant, finding that there was probable cause that FBI agents would find evidence of a criminal offense on the property.
In its 21-page ruling Thursday, the eleventh Circuit panel said Cannon was incorrect to permit an out of doors party to delay the DOJ’s probe.
“The law is evident. We cannot write a rule that permits any subject of a search warrant to dam government investigations after the execution of the warrant,” the panel wrote.
“Nor can we write a rule that permits only former presidents to achieve this,” the panel wrote.
“Either approach can be a radical reordering of our case law limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And each would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations. Accordingly, we agree with the federal government that the district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction, and that dismissal of your entire proceeding is required.”
The ruling said there was just one possible justification for Cannon to have appointed the special master under an idea often called equitable jurisdiction.
That justification can be the incontrovertible fact that Trump “is a former President of the USA,” the appeals panel noted.
Nevertheless, the panel immediately added, “It’s indeed extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the house of a former president — but not in a way that affects our legal evaluation or otherwise gives the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation.”
