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'Irreparable harm': Justice Department warns against further delay in Trump documents probe
The Justice Department on Tuesday blasted efforts by former President Donald Trump’s lawyers to delay its investigation into classified documents seized at his Florida resort while a magistrate judge unsealed some previously redacted information relating to the FBI's search of Trump's club.
"Plaintiff (Trump) has characterized the government’s criminal investigation as a 'document storage dispute' or an 'overdue library book scenario.' In doing so, Plaintiff has not addressed the potential harms that could result from mishandling classified information or the strict requirements imposed by law for handling such materials," DOJ said in a court filing urging Judge Aileen Cannon to allow its criminal investigation into the over 100 classified documents the department says it took from Trump's Florida home to proceed for the time being.
The filing noted that the documents had "markings signifying that their unauthorized disclosure 'reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security,' including 'exceptionally grave damage,'" and said any delay is causing "irreparable harm" to the government and the public.
Cannon issued an order earlier this month temporarily halting parts of the criminal investigation until a special master can review the evidence seized in the August search for attorney-client and executive privilege issues. Cannon said a national security damage assessment could continue, but the government said the two probes are interrelated and the review can't go on without the FBI's assistance. The Justice Department is asking the judge to stay her ruling while it appeals so the department can investigate how the documents were handled.
Trump's attorneys have suggested in court filings that the documents were declassified and are his personal records and belong to him — contentions the Justice Department ridiculed in its new filing.
"As to the records marked as classified, Plaintiff asserts that the government has not 'proven' their classification status. But even if Plaintiff had declassified any of these records while he was President— a proposition that Plaintiff does not specifically assert in any of his filings in these proceedings, in a sworn declaration, or through any evidence — any record bearing classification markings was necessarily created by the government and, therefore, is not Plaintiff’s personal property," the filing said.
Further, the government argued, “Even if Plaintiff had declassified these records, and even if he somehow had categorized them as his 'personal' records for purposes of the PRA (Presidential Records Act) — neither of which has been shown — nothing in the PRA or any other source of law establishes a plausible claim of privilege or any other justification for an injunction restricting the government’s review and use of records at the center of an ongoing criminal and national security investigation,” the DOJ filing said.
Separately, Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who signed off on the government's search warrant of the Trump property, unsealed some previously redacted information from the affidavit in which the feds laid out their case for the search.
Related video: Justice Department files appeal against special master ruling
The newly-released sections of the affidavit show that investigators were searching for a wide array of classified documents, including several different types of top secret documents. It also shows that when Trump's lawyers handed over 38 documents marked top secret, secret or confidential in June, they told investigators they'd all been kept in a storage room at the resort.
Justice Department officials said at the time of their June 3 visit there were about 50 boxes remaining in the room, as well as a "coat rack with suit jackets" and "interior decor items such as wall art and frames." Investigators said Trump's lawyers would not let them look inside the boxes during the visit, according to DOJ's court filings.
On June 22, DOJ subpoenaed Trump's company the Trump Organization for video surveillance footage of the storage room area going back to Jan. 10 of this year, the newly unsealed information shows, and the Trump Organization provided the FBI with a hard drive on July 6.
It's unclear why the FBI selected Jan. 10, but Trump turned over 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives and Records Administration on Jan. 18, following repeated requests by the agency. NARA said the boxes contained "highly classified documents intermingled with other records."
Reinhart unsealed the new information in light of DOJ getting judicial approval to make much of the same information available for a different filing in the case before Cannon last month.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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