President Trump Sues Biden Administration
In the wake of the unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, and FBI agents wrongfully taking the President’s passports as well as attorney-client privileged documents, President Trump has just filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration.
As reported by Fox News, President Trump is asking for an independent special master to handle the documents:
Former President Trump and his legal team filed a motion Monday evening seeking an independent review of the records seized by the FBI during its "unprecedented" and "unnecessary" raid of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, saying the decision to search his private residence just months before the 2022 midterm elections "involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump."
According to the motion filed Monday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Trump and his legal team are seeking an order to appoint a special master to review the records obtained during the search; blocks the further review of seized materials by the government until a special master is appointed; requires the Justice Department to provide a more detailed receipt for property and requires the government to return any item seized that was not within the scope of the search warrant.
We know that the lawsuit is in regards to the raid and how it was conducted, specifically how the search warrant was obtained, but also about who is actually going through President Trump’s documents. We know they did seize items they had no authority to take, and now it’s unclear who is looking through them. The concern now is that the court will tell President Trump’s legal team they should have asked for a special master two weeks ago. Two weeks is a lot of time for the FBI to have already gone through the documents, making the Trump request moot, even if the court did agree.
As my dad, ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow explained, even if President Trump’s request is granted and a special master is appointed, it may already be irrelevant:
Here’s the problem, so the FBI executes the search warrant after the judge signs off on it finding probable cause. That’s the procedure that’s followed. Then you would immediately – this is what you would normally do – you would immediately challenge the review of the documents by the FBI, because they do what’s called a taint team, and they’re looking for documents that may be attorney-client privileged or maybe even Executive privileged, although we’ll get into that in a minute. Looks like the Biden Administration waived that for Trump. Whether they could do that or not is another question, but they did. And here, when you have this taint team, that’s the FBI reviewing the FBI’s own seizure. Now it’s another group of FBI lawyers and agents, but still the FBI’s looking at it. Special master says this all goes to a judge. It could be a retired judge. And that judge will make the determination independent of the FBI. But that’s something you normally go in and ask for immediately. You don’t wait two weeks. So, I’m sure there must be some reason for this, but the problem is it could actually be moot, because I can’t imagine that the FBI hasn’t reviewed this immediately. I mean, they’ve had it for two weeks.
As my dad said, we have no idea why President Trump’s team didn’t file sooner, or move to recuse the judge who signed the search warrant who we know had a strong anti-Trump bias. We can only assume they have reasons, or perhaps they know something no one else does. Time will tell. And we will be monitoring the situation closely.
Today’s full Sekulow broadcast includes more in-depth analysis of the Trump lawsuit and what could result from this latest development. We are also joined by ACLJ Senior Advisor for National Security and Foreign Policy Ric Grenell, who also served as Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to discuss how classified documents like this are supposed to be handled.
Watch the full broadcast below: