Nor did Trump’s legal team file any declarations - i.e.
Trump also did not file with the complaint the kind of separate request - such as a motion for a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction - that would have sped up the timeline for the judge to consider what Trump was asking for. When Trump’s lawyers did cite the court rules they said gave the judge the authority to grant the request, they cited the rules of civil procedure, without any explanation for why those rules should be applied in a context concerning a criminal search warrant. (For the review, the Justice Department is using what’s known as “taint team,” which is a group of prosecutors not working on the probe in question who filter out materials that should not be handed over to investigators.)Īnd when Trump did file his request with the court, the complaint leaned heavily into political accusations, while being light on the sort of legal discussion that would explain to a court why it should intervene and what authority it had to do so. His former lawyer, Michael Cohen successfully sought the appointment of a special master when Cohen’s office and residences were searched by the FBI in 2018.īut Trump waited two weeks to make such a request, raising eyebrows because of how far along in the process the Justice Department likely is in reviewing what it seized at Mar-a-Lago. Generally speaking, it is not outside the legal norm for Trump to want a special master involved in the review of the evidence seized from his Florida residence. “What’s she saying is, ‘What are you doing in front of me?'” Mark Schnapp, a criminal defense lawyer in Florida who spent seven years working for the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, told CNN. The judge’s order showcases many of the ways that the complaint filed by Trump fell short of what would have been expected of a court submission asking for the appointment of a special master– particularly in a search as high-stakes as the one FBI executed at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month