A Trump-appointed judge ruled Thursday that the former president does not have to submit a sworn statement identifying any evidence he believes the FBI might have planted when federal agents executed a search warrant at his Florida estate last month.
The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon effectively overrules a directive from the special master she named to review evidence that was seized by the FBI in the Aug. 8 search. The special master, Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Dearie of New York, last week ordered Trump’s team to submit a “declaration or affidavit” about whether anything on the FBI’s list of items removed from Mar-a-Lago “were not seized from the Premises,” meaning items put there by someone else.
Trump has publicly insinuated on multiple occasions without offering any proof that federal agents planted evidence during their search, which the Justice Department has said turned up 100 classified, secret and top secret documents, as well as thousands of other documents the department says belong to the government.
Dearie, a Reagan appointee, initially gave Trump’s team a deadline of this Friday to submit a sworn statement on the issue, but pushed the deadline back to next week after there was a delay in getting a vendor who could share the documents with both parties in the case. Before Thursday, he was expected to push back the deadline again.
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In her ruling, Cannon suggested she believed Dearie had overstepped with his directive. Trump’s lawyers had objected to the special master’s order.
“There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant’s Inventory, its descriptions, or its contents. The Court’s Appointment Order did not contemplate that obligation,” Cannon wrote on Thursday.
She added that if any issues surface during the review process “that require reconsideration of the Inventory or the need to object to its contents, the parties shall make those matters known to the Special Master for appropriate resolution and recommendation to this Court.”
Cannon also pushed back the deadline for the special master to complete the review, to Dec. 16, citing both the delay in getting the documents to Trump’s team and his lawyers’ contention that the 11,000 documents taken from Mar-a-Lago amount to about 200,000 pages. Dearie was previously expected to complete his review by Nov. 30.
The dual components of Thursday’s ruling by Cannon are seen as temporary wins for Trump, and they come on the heels of previous orders by the judge seen as benefitting the former president. Cannon earlier granted Trump’s request for a special master, and even said the special master should review the documents for potential executive privilege claims, instead of limiting the examination to traditional attorney-client issues.
Cannon had also ordered that the classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago should be included in the special master’s review and shared with Trump’s lawyers, and that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into how the documents were handled should be postponed until the review was completed. A federal appeals court later overturned those rulings, finding that Trump had “not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
