The legal team representing former President Donald Trump requested Monday that a federal judge deny the Justice Department's request to continue reviewing documents marked classified that investigators seized from his Mar-a-Lago property. According to The New York Times, this move was another attempt to delay the investigation into whether Trump criminally mishandled files after his presidency.
Trump's legal team renewed their request for an independent third-party reviewer, or "special master," to be assigned to comprehensively review the documents that agents seized from Trump's Florida residence. They asked the presiding judge, Aileen M. Cannon, to uphold her order blocking FBI investigators from viewing any of the documents until the special master completes the independent review.
The lengthy filing contested the DOJ's inquiry into whether Trump or his staff illegally housed national secrets at his personal property. Trump's lawyers addressed the investigation as "a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control," claiming that investigators are going out of their way to criminalize Trump. They also implied that officials may have leaked information about the content of the files in question, per the Times.
Prosecutors argue that the judge's order hinders the criminal investigation's progress. The group of about 100 documents that are marked as classified makes up a small percentage of the nearly 13,000 papers gathered from Mar-a-Lago during a court-sanctioned search on Aug. 8.