A Trump-appointed judge said on Thursday that the former president did not have to submit a sworn statement identifying any evidence he believes the FBI might have planted when federal agents executed a search warrant at his Florida estate last month.
A judge in the U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon overrules a directive from the special master she named to review evidence that was seized by the FBI in the Aug. 8 search. Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Dearie of New York ordered Trump's team to submit a declaration or affidavit about whether items on the FBI's list of items removed from Mar-a-Lago were not seized from the Premises, meaning items put there by someone else.
Trump has publicly insinuated on several occasions, but he has not offered any proof that federal agents planted evidence during their search, which turns up 100 classified, secret and top secret documents, as well as thousands of other documents that the Justice Department says belong to the government.
Dearie, a Reagan appointee, initially gave Trump's team a deadline of Friday to submit a sworn statement on the issue, but pushed the deadline back to next week because there was a delay in getting a vendor to share the documents with both parties in the case. Before Thursday, he was expected to push back the deadline.
In his ruling, Cannon suggested that Dearie had overstepped with his directive. Trump's lawyers objected to the special master's order.
Before the review of any of the Seized Materials, there shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant's inventory, its descriptions, or its contents. Cannon wrote on Thursday that the Court's Appointment Order did not contemplate that obligation.
She said that if any issues arise during the review process that require reconsideration of the Inventory or the need to object to its contents, the parties must make those matters known to the Special Master for a resolution and recommendation to this Court. Cannon pushed back the deadline for the special master to do the review on December 16, citing both the delay in getting the documents to Trump's team and his lawyers' contention that the 11,000 documents taken from Mar-a-Lago amount to about 200,000 pages. Dearie was expected to complete his review by Nov. 30.
The judge said the dual components of Thursday's ruling by Cannon are seen as temporary wins for Trump, and they come on the heels of previous orders by the judge, who is seen as benefitting the former president. Cannon earlier granted Trump's request for a special master, and even said the special master should review the documents for potential executive privilege claims instead of limiting the examination to traditional attorney-client issues.
Cannon had ordered that the classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago be included in the special master's review and shared with Trump's lawyers, and that the Justice Department's criminal investigation into how the documents were handled should be postponed until the review is complete. A federal appeals court overturned those rulings, finding that Trump had not even tried to show that he had a need to know the information contained in the classified documents.