Supreme Court denies Trump's documents request in Mar-a-Lago case

It's a bad day to be former President Donald Trump.

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the former president's request to intervene in the ongoing dispute over documents seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago mansion.

More specifically, Trump had last week asked the justices to reconsider a portion of a lower court's order that exempted 103 of the recovered documents from a special master, or outside third party, review. The Justice Department then argued that allowing an outside arbiter to analyze the classified documents would "irreparably injure" the government, per the The Washington Post. Raymond Dearie, the special master in the case, is otherwise reviewing the remaining FBI-seized documents to see if "any should be shielded from investigators because of attorney-client or executive privilege," the Post writes.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

The court's Thursday response to the former president's emergency request was brief, and but a sentence long: "The application to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on Sept. 21, 2022, presented to Justice Thomas and by him referred to the court is denied." There were no noted dissents.

As a result of the order, neither Dearie nor Trump's legal team will have access to the 100-some documents in question, notes The New York Times.

Explore More

Brigid Kennedy worked at The Week from 2021 to 2023 as a staff writer, junior editor and then story editor, with an interest in U.S. politics, the economy and the music industry.