Washington 30 August : The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has concluded its examination of documents taken in the search of the former residence of president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.The conclusion of the review late on Monday could hinder Trump’s legal team’s efforts to thwart any review of the documents until a third party has been appointed to review them, according to Xinhua news agency.
This follows the federal judge in Florida on the 27th of August indicated that she could be appointed an “special master” to look over the contents of some of the documents seized in the raid.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon who was named by Trump himself she did not request an investigation, but declared that she had an “preliminary intention” to conduct one.
The judge heard the arguments in her courtroom on Thursday.
Trump’s legal team made an application last week to an outside party to examine the documents that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents uncovered in the raid on August 8 of the former president’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
The FBI raid caused outrage in Republican lawmakers as well as conservative media.
The agency that was investigating claimed it had “probable reason” that justified a search according to the bureau’s belief that it could find “evidence of obstruction”, which is a crime in the US at the Trump’s residence.
Trump’s legal team argued that the scope of search was not enough, and pointed out that agents snatched away the former president’s passports.
On August 26th Bruce Reinhart, another federal judge issued an order for the release of the copy of the affidavit for a search warrant which claimed that agents in May had discovered more than 200 documents identified by the degree of they were kept.
The documents were found in boxes in Trump’s Florida address.
The affidavit, however, was so heavily redacted that whole pages were blacked out according to US media.
The affidavit states that 25 of the documents were marked “top classified”.Sixty-seven of them were classified as “confidential” and 92 were classified as “secret”.
In a press conference on Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stressed the fact that the FBI is conducting an independent investigation and “we did not participate”.
This was in response to criticisms from critics that the White House is using the DOJ — whose director was appointed by Biden, President Joe Biden — to hinder Trump from running for president in 2024.
In the meantime, Trump on Sunday took to Truth Social, the social media platform he created, to claim that the FBI as well as the DOJ were involved in electoral interference “at the most ominous and deceitful level the country has ever witnessed before and as well in the Midterms and in the 2024 Presidential Election”.
This was in response to a post the day before in which he declared that the FBI raid was an “disgrace for our current Third World Nation”.
Trump described the raid as an “unprecedented incident, unneeded and unannounced” FBI/DOJ raid (Break-In!) of my house, Mar-a-Lago.The attack was aimed at political reasons just before the Midterm Elections (and 2024, of course!).It’s a shame for our present Third World Nation”.
The FBI raid has provoked an Republican outrage, with Republican lawmakers alleging that the raid has transformed the head of the West into an “banana Republic”.
Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis labelled the search “another an increase in the militarization of Federal agencies to attack the Regime’s political enemies”.
A rising Republican star South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem claimed the raid was “un-American”.
In stark contrast Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the case raises new issues.
“It is vital for us to be aware at some point what the risk our security as a nation was” she.
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