By Aaron Miller-
Donald Trump has filed a legal suit against the U.S government over the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home in an effort to prevent agency officials from inspecting certain materials seized without third-party oversight.
Eleven sets of classified files were taken from Mr Trump’s Florida estate on 8 August, during the unprecedented search by the FBI. Mr Trump is being investigated for potentially mishandling sensitive documents when he was in power.
U.S presidents are legally obligated to transfer all of their documents and emails to a government agency called the National Archive . The FBI is investigating whether Mr Trump improperly handled records by taking them from the White House to Mar-a-Lago after he left office in January 2021.
He has denied any wrongdoing and said the items were declassified.
In the 27-page document filed in a Florida court, Mr Trump’s legal team accuses the justice department of an ulterior motive in conducting the search in the first place. The former president’s legal team described the search as “simply wanting the camel’s nose under the tent so they could rummage for either politically helpful documents or support efforts to thwart President Trump from running again”.
“President Donald J Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run,” it says.
“Law enforcement is a shield that protects Americans,” it continues. “It cannot be used as a weapon for political purposes.”
The “shockingly aggressive move” on Mar-a-Lago by about two dozen FBI agents took place “with no understanding of the distress that it would cause most Americans”, said Mr Trump’s lawyers.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a brief statement that prosecutors were aware of Mr Trump’s lawsuit, and would respond in court. The “search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was authorised by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause”, said spokesman Anthony Coley.
It comes as the New York Times reported on Monday that agents had so far recovered over 300 documents with classified markings from Mr Trump, including material from the CIA, the National Security Agency and the FBI.
Mr Trump’s legal action was filed in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday, before a judge that Mr Trump nominated to the bench in 2020.
Mr Trump is suing for a more detailed list of exactly what was taken from his estate and is asking for the government to return any item which was not in the scope of the search warrant.
His lawyers have also asked that a “neutral” third-party attorney – known as a special master – be brought in to determine whether the seized files are covered by executive privilege, which allows presidents to keep certain communications under wraps.
Special masters are normally appointed in criminal cases where there are concerns that some evidence may be protected under attorney-client privilege, or other protections that could make it inadmissible in court.
The court filing argues that Mr Trump had been co-operating with agents before the FBI turned up unannounced at his home.
Lawyers for the former U.S president say the warrant was overly broad, and that the search violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S Constitution, which protects Americans against unreasonable search and seizure.
His legal team also accuse the government of leaking “ever-changing, and inaccurate, ‘justifications'” for the search to favoured media outlets.
A classified CIA report shows the agency was unable to find any evidence supporting Israel’s decision to label six prominent Palestinian NGOs as “terrorist organizations”.
Last October, Israel claimed that the organizations were front groups for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a leftist political party that has a paramilitary branch.
Earlier this year, Israel passed intelligence about the designation to the US, but a CIA intelligence assessment of the material did not find any evidence to support the claim, according to two sources familiar with the study. The CIA report “doesn’t say that the groups are guilty of anything”, one source said.
Terror designations ‘unfounded’. Numerous states, including allies of Israel, have rejected the terror designation as unfounded. The United States has not publicly criticized or questioned it, but nor has it placed the groups under a US terror designation.