Former U.S. President Donald Trump has sued the U.S. government over the search warrant for his Mar-a-Lago mansion. He wants to prevent the FBI from reading the seized documents until a special court representative is appointed to review them, The Guardian reports.
One of Trump’s lawyers, Jim Trusty, said that “the court should appoint a special deputy, usually a retired judge or a lawyer, because there is a possibility that FBI seized confidential documents, and the Justice Department should not decide for itself what it can and cannot use in its investigation.
According to the New York Times, the U.S. government has seized more than 300 documents marked “classified” at Trump’s Florida estate. Among them, it said, were reports from CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI. An initial batch of more than 150 classified documents was seized by the National Archives Service in January, according to the publication cited by Agerpres.
In June, Donald Trump’s advisers handed over a second set of documents to the U.S. Justice Department, while a third batch was seized by the FBI in a raid at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Neither the Justice Department nor the former president’s representatives responded to Reuters’ request for comment on those documents. The search of FBI is part of a federal investigation into whether Trump illegally took documents at the end of his term in January 2021.
Until now, the exact scope of the material found by U.S. security forces at Trump’s residence was not known, EFE writes. The content of the documents that Trump took from the White House will not be made public because it is “classified” material.
The Justice Department has published only some fragments of the search warrant on the basis of which the FBI inspected the residence of the former American president. The warrant mentions the fact that Trump and those around him may have committed crimes such as obstruction of justice, destruction of documents and violation of the Espionage Act.