A federal appeals court on Thursday removed a major obstacle to the criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of government documents, ending an outside review of thousands of records the F.B.I. seized from his home and freeing the Justice Department to use them in its inquiry, writes NYTIMES.
In a unanimous but unsigned 21-page ruling, a three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta shut down a lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that has, for nearly three months, slowed the inquiry into whether he illegally kept national security records at his Mar-a-Lago residence and obstructed the government’s efforts to retrieve them.
The appeals court was sharply critical of the decision in September by Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who sits in the Southern District of Florida, to intervene in the case. The court said Judge Cannon never had legitimate jurisdiction to order the review or bar investigators from using the files, and that there was no justification for treating Mr. Trump differently from any other target of a search warrant.
“It is indeed extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president — but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or otherwise gives the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation,” the court wrote.
It was unclear whether Mr. Trump would appeal the appeals court’s decision. Lawyers for the former president did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump had already asked the Supreme Court to overturn an earlier ruling by the appeals court that excluded 103 documents marked as classified from Judge Cannon’s review, but the justices rejected his request without any noted dissents.
The ruling on Thursday did precisely that, cutting short Judge Dearie’s work before he even completed his review of the materials. During his brief tenure as a special master, Judge Dearie, expressed skepticism about claims by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that the documents he was examining were in fact privileged and thus could be withheld from the Justice Department’s investigation.
In recent weeks, several witnesses connected to the investigation have appeared in front of a grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington. On Thursday, that included three close aides to Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The aides were Dan Scavino Jr., Mr. Trump’s former social media guru, William Russell and William B. Harrison, who worked for Mr. Trump when he was in the White House, the people said.
