WASHINGTON — A special master review of documents taken from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate should not have been approved, the Department of Justice argued in its first filing in the appeal to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
The department is asking the court to overturn U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to appoint a special master to review more than 11,000 records retrieved during the Aug. 8 search of the Florida property by the FBI, and to block the department from using any of the documents for its investigation until the monthslong process ends.
In the filing, the department states that the recovered documents are “the very objects” of an “ongoing criminal investigation.”
