“If I had to write Trump’s reply to this crazy good brief I have no idea what I would say,” said former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal. “At all.”
Legal experts say that a Department of Justice (DOJ) filing in response to former President Donald Trump’s request for the Supreme Court to intervene in the dispute over documents seized at Mar-a-Lago is “compelling” and “masterful.”
Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court last week, urging them to allow special master Raymond Dearie to review the 100 documents recovered at his south Florida residence. The filing was in response to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that allowed the DOJ to continue using the classified documents in a criminal investigation of the former president. Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon had previously ruled that the documents would be off limits pending their review by Dearie.
The DOJ filed its response to Trump’s request on Tuesday, the deadline that had been set by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is in charge of overseeing cases from the 11th Circuit. The brief from the DOJ urged the Supreme Court to reject Trump’s request, arguing that the former president had not come close to showing he had been “irreparably injured” by the appeals court ruling and had demonstrated “no plausible claim of privilege or ownership” over the classified documents.
