Appeals court says Justice Department can use classified documents in criminal probe of Trump

A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a Florida federal judge’s order which effectively barred the Department of Justice from using classified documents found at former president Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home to further a criminal investigation into him and his associates.

The panel said they agreed with the government’s argument that District Judge Aileen Cannon “likely erred in exercising ... jurisdiction to enjoin the United States’s use of the classified records in its criminal investigation and to require the United States to submit the marked classified documents to a special master for review”.

“For our part, we cannot discern why Plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings,” they said.

The judges added that Mr Trump “has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents”.

“Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents. And even if he had, that, in and of itself, would not explain why Plaintiff has an individual interest in the classified documents”.

Continuing, the panel noted that Mr Trump’s lawyers have provided “no evidence that any of these records were declassified” despite suggestions by the ex-president that he may have done so.

“In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal. So even if we assumed that Plaintiff did declassify some or all of the documents, that would not explain why he has a personal interest in them,” they said.

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