WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump either abandoned or failed to prove core privilege issues that he originally raised in pushing for a special master to review documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago home, the Justice Department said.
In a filing Thursday, government lawyers wrote that Trump’s lawyers barely mentioned his original claim that documents might be covered by executive privilege in a court brief earlier this month. That means he gave up on that argument, the government said in its reply filed in the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
As for another key element of Trump’s case — whether seized materials were protected by attorney-client privilege — the Justice Department said that after Trump’s lawyers reviewed all of the thousands of records, the two sides now disagreed over whether that privilege applied only to a portion of a one-page document.
