Justice Department urges Supreme Court to decline Trump request over Mar-a-Lago documents seized by FBI

Washington — The Justice Department on Tuesday urged the Supreme Court to keep roughly 100 documents with classified markings off limits from the independent third party reviewing records seized from former President Donald Trump's Florida residence. These documents were among the thousands retrieved in the search.

In a filing to the high court, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said it should reject Trump's request to disseminate the records bearing classification markings to the independent third party, or special master. The emergency request, she wrote, concerns "an unprecedented order by the district court restricting the Executive Branch's use of its own highly classified records in an ongoing criminal investigation and directing the dissemination of those records outside the Executive Branch for a special-master review." 

"The district court appointed the special master to review claims of privilege and for the return of personal property, but [Trump] has no plausible claim of privilege in or ownership of government records bearing classification markings," she told the Supreme Court. "As the court of appeals recognized, [Trump] thus has no basis to demand special-master review of those records."