(West Palm Beach) A US judge Thursday, without announcing a decision at the moment, examined Donald Trump’s request to appoint an independent expert to review documents seized by the FBI during a search of his Florida home, in order to determine if some of them could remain classified.
Posted yesterday at 5:16pm.
Federal Judge Eileen Cannon, who was appointed by Donald Trump in 2020, heard Republican lawyers and Justice Department officials during a hearing in West Palm Beach, Florida.
And she said that she will later decide to appoint an independent third party that the former president desires, without further details at the present time about the date of this announcement, according to the information of several American media.
CNN quoted one of Trump’s lawyers, Christopher Case, as saying that appointing an independent expert would build confidence in the investigation and “reduce tension” in the country.
Department representatives argued that Mr. Trump was no longer president, and could not claim to keep the documents.
Since the astonishing and unprecedented police operation of a former US president, carried out by the FBI on August 8 in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Donald Trump has been attacking and repeating an act he considers “unlawful and unconstitutional” after they were targeted for political reasons.
Trump, who is more frankly flirting with the idea of a new candidacy in 2024, has so asked the justices to appoint an expert to review the seized documents and determine what could be returned to him or classified as “secret” – and thus would not be usable in investigations against him.
The Justice Department has strongly opposed such an appointment, saying it could block investigators’ access to the documents and “would severely harm the interests of the government, including national security.”
According to the ministry document, top-secret texts seized from the former president’s home “were likely to have been hidden” to impede the federal police investigation that targeted him.
In January, the former president’s teams handed 15 boxes of documents he took when he left the White House to the National Archives, which is responsible for recording presidential activities for history.
After examining these boxes, the FBI, convinced that Donald Trump kept other classified documents in Florida under potentially inappropriate conditions, decided to search, and on this occasion confiscated about thirty more boxes of documents.
Investigators suspect that the Republican violated the US Espionage Act, which strictly regulates the possession of classified documents. Donald Trump confirmed that these documents have been declassified.
He is also the target of investigations into his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his role in his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
He is currently not prosecuted in any way.
