The DOJ is about to run up against a Trump-packed appeals court as it fights the appointment of a special master in the Mar-a-Lago caseIn late summer 2018, then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh was not spending much time at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit as he met with senators in preparation for a contentious Supreme Court confirmation process.
But one Tuesday that August, Kavanaugh emerged at the DC Circuit for the swearing-in of a former law clerk, Britt Grant, to the federal appeals court in Atlanta. In a ceremonial courtroom adorned with statues of Moses and Hammurabi, Kavanaugh praised his 40-year-old former clerk's quick rise through the legal ranks — from DC Circuit clerk to associate at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, to solicitor general of Georgia, to justice on the state's supreme court, to judge on the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
The swearing-in ceremony was a celebration of just one of the six judges former President Donald Trump would appoint by the end of his term to the 11th Circuit, an appeals court where his administration left a particularly lasting mark in its frenzied push to fill the federal bench.
Four years later, that court is set to hear a high-stakes dispute between the Justice Department and Trump over the FBI's search of his Mar-a-Lago home last month. On Thursday, the Justice Department formally gave notice of its plans to appeal a controversial ruling that granted Trump's request for an outside arbiter to review the more than 11,000 documents retrieved from his South Florida residence on August 8.
In an order widely criticized for its dubious claims about executive privilege and unusual solicitude to Trump's demands, Judge Aileen Cannon blocked federal prosecutors from further examining the materials until the outside arbiter — known as a "special master" — completed the review.
With the opinion, Cannon effectively paused a key facet of the Justice Department's criminal inquiry into whether the former president violated the Espionage Act and other federal laws that bar the concealment, alteration, and destruction of government records.
Cannon, a Trump appointee confirmed in 2020, conferred on the special master broad powers that went beyond filtering records potentially subject to attorney-client privilege to also include documents that might be subject to claims of executive privilege.
In her ruling, Cannon included a carve-out allowing for intelligence agencies to continue an assessment of the potential national security risks posed by Trump's hoarding of government records at his West Palm Beach estate. But in its appeal Thursday, the Justice Department said the national security assessment could not be "readily segregated" from the criminal investigation............
https://www.businessinsider.com/doj-will-face-trump-packed-appeals-court-special-master-fight-2022-9
