On Tuesday, the 11th circuit court of appeals seemed to agree with the justice department that the special master review of documents the FBI seized from Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence should be stopped.
Should Trump lose, it will mark the end of the special master process on which he has relied to delay, and gain more insight into, the investigation surrounding his potential mishandling of national security information
The coverage of Trump's presidential bid by the rightwing media shows it can't be turned away.
The three-judge panel, led by chief appellate judge William Pryor, did not issue a ruling from the bench in Atlanta, Georgia, but seemed skeptical that Trump should get special treatment and be able to undermine a criminal investigation because of his status as a former president
If there was no extraordinary circumstance, it was not appropriate for the judicial branch to interfere in an executive branch investigation.
Jim Trusty was asked if he thought the FBI seizure of documents from Mar-a-Lago was legal and if they had found any other cases in which the target of a search warrant got an injunction.
There seemed to be nothing unusual in this case other than the fact that Trump was a previous president.
Trusty argued that the case was extraordinary and deserved the appointment of a special master because of the fact that Trump was a former president.
"If you can't establish that, what are we doing here?" he asked.
Cannon misapplied the Richey test used to make her judgement and the 11th circuit should end the injunction preventing federal investigators from examining the documents under review by the special master.
The original rationale is at issue. Cannon found that Trump did not meet the first Richey test, but that she felt he met additional tests.
The former president's legal team disagreed with the department's interpretation of the 11th circuit's reasoning.
The department argued that Cannon was wrong to prevent it from looking at the materials under review.
If Trump could show that a portion of the documents were protected by executive or attorney-client privilege, then they wouldn't be part of the evidence cache obtained by federal investigators.
In the course of the special master process, Trump's lawyers have argued that the documents were personal. The trouble for Trump is that they would have been seized if that was true.
The documents were seized from Mar-a-Lago after Trump requested the appointment of a special master to look at them.
Cannon granted the request on the basis of Trump's status as a former president, and temporarily barred the department from using the seized materials in its criminal investigation.
The department appealed part of Cannon's order to the 11th circuit which sided with the government and ordered the 103 classified documents to be excluded from the special master review.
The department appealed the entire special master order after Cannon was rebuked in court for abusing her discretion.
The department wrote that the court had already granted the government's motion to stay the order. The order should be reversed in its entirety for a number of reasons.
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