Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday asked the United States Supreme Court to intervene in the case related to the documents seized this summer at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
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The Republican billionaire sent an urgent appeal to the high court to prevent the Ministry of Justice from examining a hundred documents marked “classified”, seized on this occasion.
This appeal does not relate to the legality of the spectacular search carried out in August by the federal police at Mar-a-Lago, and does not address any substantive issue.
He is just challenging a decision by a court of appeal which authorized the ministry to examine these documents without waiting for the conclusions of an independent expert, responsible for reviewing the 11,000 documents seized.
The Supreme Court, which was profoundly overhauled by Donald Trump during his tenure, is not obliged to accept his appeal. Although it has six out of nine conservative magistrates, it has already inflicted setbacks on him, in particular by refusing to support him in his post-election crusade.
This new legal battle concerns the archives of the White House. When he left power in January 2021, Donald Trump took entire boxes of documents. However, a law of 1978 obliges any American president to transmit all of his emails, letters and other working documents to the National Archives.
In January 2020, he finally gave them fifteen boxes. After examining them, the federal police, however, estimated that he probably kept others in his luxurious residence in Mar-a-Lago. FBI agents went there for the first time in June and became convinced that not all the documents had been given to them.
On August 8, they conducted an unprecedented search on the basis of a warrant for “retention of classified documents” and “obstructing a federal investigation”, and seized about thirty other boxes.
Since Donald Trump, who flirts with the idea of running for a new term in 2024, says he is “persecuted” politically and ensures that the documents seized are personal or declassified.
He is also being sued in civil proceedings by the New York courts, which accuses him of having manipulated the assets of his group to obtain more advantageous loans or reduce his taxes.