Thursday, a federal appeals court panel overturned a lower court’s judgment allowing a special master to analyze records seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. This was a huge success for the Department of Justice under the Biden administration.

In August, federal agents raided Trump’s house and seized hundreds of papers, claiming that many of them included sensitive and secret information. The former president filed suit to restrict the scope of the Justice Department’s study of records he brought to Florida when he left office in January 2021.

In September, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida sided with Trump and appointed a special master to evaluate papers and determine which may be utilized by the DOJ, which appealed the judgment.

Thursday’s decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta goes into effect on December 8. According to The New York Times, this would be the end of the special master’s review barring an appeal.

The Washington Post quotes a Trump spokesman as saying, “The panel’s decision today is purely procedural and based only on jurisdiction.”

“The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal, and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago,” the representative said.

According to the appeal court’s conclusion, the issue hinged on whether Cannon had the authority to behave as she did. The three judges agreed that she did not.

The justices hearing the case were William Pryor, who was selected by previous President George W. Bush, and Andrew Brasher and Britt Grant, who were nominated by President Trump.

They stated that the case did not warrant Cannon’s intervention because to the nature of its circumstances.

The judge was unconvinced by Trump’s claim that he sued for the return of records that contained plainly personal materials.

“Even if Plaintiff’s statutory interpretation were correct (a proposition that we neither consider nor endorse), personal interest in or ownership of a seized document is not synonymous with the need for its return.

3 In most search warrants, the government seizes property that unambiguously belongs to the subject of a search. That cannot be enough to support equitable jurisdiction,” the judges said in the ruling.

The ruling rejected Trump’s assertation that documents would be improperly disclosed, saying “any leak of classified material would be properly characterized as a harm to the United States and its citizens — not as a personal injury to Plaintiff.”

More on this story via The Western Journal:

Calling Trump’s arguments “a sideshow,” the judges wrote that as of this point, there has been no constitutional violation, adding that “requiring federal courts to oversee routine criminal investigations beyond their constitutionally ascribed role of approving a search warrant based on a showing of probable cause. Our precedents do not allow this, and neither does our constitutional structure.”

The court then attacked the concept that as a former president, Trump should be allotted special consideration. CONTINUE READING…