Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday asked the US Supreme Court to intervene in the case related to documents seized this summer at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida residence.
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The billionaire Republican made an urgent appeal to the Supreme Court to prevent the Ministry of Justice from examining 100 documents marked “secret” seized on this occasion.
This appeal does not relate to the legality of the spectacular August search by the Federal Police in Mar-a-Lago, nor does it address any substantive issue.
He is only challenging a decision of the Court of Appeal that authorized the ministry to examine these documents without waiting for the conclusions of an independent expert, responsible for reviewing 11,000 confiscated documents.
The Supreme Court, which Donald Trump has radically overhauled during his tenure, is not obligated to accept his appeal. Although she had six out of nine conservative judges, she actually caused him setbacks, notably by refusing to support him in his post-election crusade.
This new legal battle concerns the White House archives. When he left office in January 2021, Donald Trump took entire boxes of documents. However, a 1978 law requires any US president to send all of his emails, letters, and other business documents to the National Archives.
In January 2020, he finally gave them fifteen boxes. After examining them, the Federal Police estimated that he may have kept others in his luxury home in Mar-a-Lago. FBI agents first went there in June and became convinced that not all of the documents had been handed over to them.
On August 8, they conducted an unprecedented search on the basis of a memorandum of “keeping secret documents” and “obstructing a federal investigation”, and confiscated about thirty other funds.
Since Donald Trump, flirting with the idea of running for re-election in 2024, has said he is “persecuted” politically and ensures that the documents seized are personal or declassified.
He is also being sued in a civil lawsuit by the New York Courts, which charges him with manipulating his group’s assets to obtain more beneficial loans or lower his taxes.
