The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday formally terminated the outside review of government documents seized from former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in an August FBI raid. The appellate court had rejected the review by a "special master" a week earlier, but stayed its decision in case Trump appealed to the Supreme Court. He did not. So the Justice Department now has unfettered access to the nearly 3,000 records taken from Mar-a-Lago under a court-approved warrant.
Convincing a Trump-appointed lower-court judge to approve a special master to oversee the documents was an unexpected win for Trump and his legal team. And the gambit did delay the Justice Department's investigation of Trump's handling of sensitive government documents for several weeks.
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