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President Donald Trump’s legal team has filed an emergency request asking the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to vacate the Eleventh Circuit’s stay of an order issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Per SCOTUSblog, the emergency request is urging the Supreme Court to step into the legal skirmish over classified documents that the FBI seized during its unprecedented raid on Mar-a-Lago in August.
The filing was addressed to the Honorable Justice Clarence Thomas, the Circuit Justice for the Eleventh Circuit. It pointed out that the District Court had acknowledged the need for a Special Master in reviewing the classified documents.
As previously reported by RSBN, Trump’s legal team had asked the Eleventh Circuit of Appeals to deny the DOJ’s motion to appeal the order that granted a special master in the case in late September.
In the SCOTUS filing, Trump’s lawyers noted that the Eleventh Circuit had granted a stay of the special master order, “effectively compromising the integrity of the well-established policy against piecemeal appellate review and ignoring the District Court’s broad discretion without justification.”
The filing added, “This unwarranted stay should be vacated as it impairs substantially the ongoing, time-sensitive work of the Special Master. Moreover, any limit on the comprehensive and transparent review of materials seized in the extraordinary raid of a President’s home erodes public confidence in our system of justice.”
President Donald Trump was listed in the filing as having submitted the application for a limited review of the Eleventh Circuit’s stay, arguing that they lacked the “jurisdiction to review, much less stay, an interlocutory of the District Court providing for the Special Master to review materials seized from President Trump’s home…”
According to the filing, 103 of the documents seized from Trump’s home bore “classified” markings, and were a part of an overall haul of around 11,000 total documents. The filing also listed 1,500 magazines, 20 gifts or articles of clothing, 89 empty envelopes, medical records, tax documents, and more that were taken.
