A judge delays the investigation after the FBI raid on the Mar-a-Lago mansion by ruling in favor of appointing a “special magistrate” to rule on whether or not the Justice Department can use the classified material seized
A legal victory in court has given Donald Trump a temporary advantage in his battle against the Justice Department, which will delay the ongoing investigation into the illegal theft of top-secret documents seized in the FBI raid on his Marseille mansion. a-Lake last month. Florida District Court Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Monday in favor of the former US president in his request to appoint a “special magistrate” to adjudicate whether or not the government can use the classified material in the investigation that carries out against him.
The surprising decision of Judge Cannon, a magistrate appointed by Trump, has been considered by numerous legal experts as “deeply problematic” and of dubious judicial ethics since it has been made by a magistrate appointed by the former president himself. Both sides have until Friday as the deadline to present a joint list of possible candidates from which a qualified “special magistrate” can be appointed to rule in an independent arbiter role on the secret documents.
Although the appointment of a special arbitration magistrate is not new, and was also used in the home and office search cases of two of the former president’s former lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Cohen, Trump’s case is different. The highly sensitive classified information category of the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago makes it unclear how a special magistrate, usually a retired attorney or judge, would be able to form an opinion on material restricted access even to many FBI officials.
Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, didn’t mince words, calling the former president’s request for a special magistrate a “shitty basin.” Barr, who protected Trump from Robert Mueller’s independent investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, has recently become one of the former president’s harshest critics. In an appearance on the ultra-conservative Fox News channel, he defended the FBI raid and condemned Joe Biden’s predecessor for taking secret government documents, an action he called an “abuse of power.”
Just nine weeks before the mid-term elections in early November, and despite the delay that the new legal case may cause in the investigation against the former president, the Department of Justice enters the 60-day period prior to elections in which must refrain from public actions that may have any electoral impact.
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