Politics

(WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.) — The DOJ and lawyers for former President Donald Trump faced off in a Florida court Thursday on whether there should be a special master review of the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago.

Lawyers for the Justice Department and former President Donald Trump faced off in a Florida courtroom Thursday over whether there should be a judge-ordered independent review of the documents the FBI seized last month at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Trump’s lawyers had said the third-party review was needed to deal with matters involving potentially privileged materials, including both attorney-client and executive privilege.

But the Justice Department has said a previously-established “filter team” has already finished its review of potentially attorney-client privilege materials that were seized in the raid. They have also urged Judge Aileen Cannon to reject any claims by Trump of executive privilege over the items, noting that his status as a former president means he has no right to continue to possess the documents.

At the end of Thursday’s hearing, Judge Cannon said she would not be ruling from the bench and would enter a written order in due time. She did not give a timeline.

But she indicated she is seriously considering appointing a “special master” to review the documents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, an order that would put on hold investigators’ review of the materials.

Cannon, a federal judge nominated by Trump, indicated that if she were to appoint a special master it would not have an impact on the current ongoing assessment by the intelligence community.

The judge asked to hear from one of the lawyers on the government’s filter team that has already gone through the documents. The filter team has not shared what it has deemed to be potentially privileged with investigators.

During the arguments, Trump lawyer Jim Trusty equated Trump’s refusal to return documents to the National Archives and Records Administration to an “overdue library book,” adding that the ongoing dispute with the Archives “has been transformed into a criminal investigation.”

Christopher Kise, who was just recently added to Trump’s legal team, referenced the “significant lack of trust between the parties” and said that the “temperature is very high,” telling the judge that there is a “public lack of faith” in the Justice Department and “real or perceived lack of transparency.”

“We need respectfully to lower the temperature of both sides. We need to take a deep breath,” Kise told the judge.

“This is not a case about some Department of Defense staffer stuffing military papers” in a bag and sneaking out in the middle of the night, Kise said, arguing the documents Trump had in his possession were presidential records in the possession of the president of the United States.

Justice Department lawyer Jay Bratt took issue with that, saying , “He is no longer the president and because he was no longer the president he did not have the right to take those documents.”

“They aren’t his,” Bratt said, referring to the seized documents.

“They have put forth no evidence that there was any disregard for the former president’s rights,” Bratt said.

He told the judge the appointment of a special master would hinder their investigation. He said that doing so could give people access to the documents who didn’t have a right to see them — in other words, back in the hands of the former president.

Bratt said investigators would have no idea where they would be stored and the documents would be given back to people who don’t have the right to access them.

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(WASHINGTON) — Two former top Trump White House lawyers are expected to appear Friday before a federal grand jury investigating the events surrounding Jan. 6, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin were subpoenaed by a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, ABC News reported last month.

The move to subpoena the two men has signaled an even more dramatic escalation in the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack than previously known. Members of former Vice President Mike Pence’s staff have also appeared before a grand jury.

Officials with the Department of Justice declined to comment when reached by ABC News. A representative for Cipollone and Philbin also declined to comment.

Sources previously told ABC News that attorneys for Cipollone and Philbin were expected to engage in negotiations around any grand jury appearance, while weighing concerns regarding potential claims of executive privilege.

In July, Cipollone spoke to the House Jan. 6 select committee for a lengthy closed-door interview, portions of which have been shown during two of the committee’s most recent public hearings.

Cipollone spoke to the committee on a number of topics, including how he wanted then-President Donald Trump to do more to quell the riot on the day of the attack, and how Cabinet secretaries contemplated convening a meeting to discuss Trump’s decision-making in the wake of the attack.

Both Cipollone and Philbin have also sat for interviews with the FBI regarding Trump’s handling of documents.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden on Thursday will speak in prime time about the “soul of the nation” as he ramps ups his political messaging ahead of the midterm elections this November.

Biden is set to make the remarks from outside Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia at 8 p.m. in what will be his second trip to the battleground state this week.

Biden will “speak about how the core values of this nation — our standing in the world, our democracy — are at stake,” according to a White House official.

“He will talk about the progress we have made as a nation to protect our democracy, but how our rights and freedoms are still under attack,” the official said. “And he will make clear who is fighting for those rights, fighting for those freedoms, and fighting for our democracy.”

The ramped-up rhetoric appears to mirror Biden’s 2020 messaging, in which he presented himself as a clear contrast to Donald Trump and the race itself as an inflection point for the nation.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Thursday’s speech would be in the same vein as his messages to the nation after the Charlottesville clash involving white nationalists and on the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol.

Biden has repeatedly cited Charlottesville as the moment he decided he was going to run for president. In a 2017 article for the Atlantic, Biden said the deadly event was indicative that the “giant forward steps we have taken in recent years on civil liberties and civil rights and human rights are being met by a ferocious pushback from the oldest and darkest forces in America.”

“You think about the battle continues, and so what the president believes, which is a reason to have this in prime time, is that there are an overwhelming amount of Americans, majority of Americans, who believe that we need to … save the core values of our country,” Jean-Pierre told ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Mary Bruce during Wednesday’s press briefing.

Jean-Pierre pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision striking down abortion rights — in which Justice Clarence Thomas called for the reconsideration of rulings involving same-sex marriage, contraception and other unenumerated rights — as evidence the rights of Americans are in jeopardy.

Biden’s speech Thursday comes after a stop in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, earlier this week, where he went after “MAGA Republicans” for their response to the Jan. 6 attack and the FBI search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

“For God’s sake, whose side are you on? Whose side are you on?” a fired-up Biden pressed as he made the case for his administration’s plan for policing and crime prevention.

More criticisms of his Republican colleagues could be in store, as Jean-Pierre said Biden views MAGA Republicans as the “most energized part of the Republican Party” and won’t be “shy” about speaking out.

“The president thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy,” she said on Wednesday.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will be in Scranton ahead of Biden’s speech on Thursday to offer a preemptive rebuttal.

“He will talk about what he has heard from the American people this summer regarding rising crime, record high inflation and other hardships brought on by the Democrats’ harmful policies,” read a media advisory from McCarthy’s team.

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(WASHINGTON) — Democrat Mary Peltola is projected to win the Alaska special general election for the state’s sole House seat, ABC News reports.

Peltola defeated two Republicans — former Republican Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich — and will be the first Democrat to represent the state in the House in nearly half a century, succeeding Rep. Don Young, who died in March.

Peltola will also be the first Alaska Native to represent the state in Congress.

“What’s most important is that I’m an Alaskan being sent to represent all Alaskans. Yes, being Alaska Native is part of my ethnicity, but I’m much more than my ethnicity,” Peltola said following the announcements of the results according to the Anchorage Daily News.

The election, which was called on Wednesday some two weeks after voting ended, was historic for a more technical reason: It was the first Alaska race that used ranked-choice ballots.

The process — which advocates said would encourage more consensus-building but Palin criticized as “convoluted” — worked like this: If a candidate in the election had initially won more than 50% of first-choice votes, they would have won the race outright. That didn’t happen in the special race on Aug. 17. (Peltola ended up with about 40%.)

Then, the candidate with the least amount of first-place votes — Begich — was eliminated and that candidate’s voters instead had their ballots redistributed to their second choice until one candidate got at least 50%.

Peltola is an indigenous Yup-ik Alaskan and former member of the Alaska House of Representatives. As a state lawmaker, she chaired the bipartisan Bush Caucus of rural politicians. In addition, she served in the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission before leaving for her congressional campaign.

On the trail, she prioritized climate change, responsible resource development and infrastructure for airports, ferries, highways and energy grids.

Peltola will only serve the remainder of Young’s term, which ends in January. She is on the ballot again in November — along with Palin and Begich — to try and win a full two-year term.

In a statement Wednesday, Palin repeated her criticism of ranked-choice voting, saying it “was sold as the way to make elections better reflect the will of the people” but that it has the “opposite” effect.

She said that “though we’re disappointed in this outcome, Alaskans know I’m the last one who’ll ever retreat. Instead, I’m going to reload. With optimism that Alaskans learn from this voting system mistake and correct it in the next election, let’s work even harder to send an America First conservative to Washington in November.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump on Wednesday responded to the Justice Department in the dispute over Trump’s request for a “special master” to review materials the FBI seized at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Trump’s lawyers have argued to a federal judge in Florida that the review is needed to deal with matters they argue could be covered by executive privilege.

Late Tuesday, the Justice Department, ahead of a court hearing Thursday, laid out in extraordinary detail DOJ’s efforts to obtain highly classified records they allege were improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago since Trump’s departure from the White House, and the resistance — which they describe outright as obstructive conduct, that they were met with by Trump’s representatives in their efforts to have them handed over.

Judge Aileen Cannon has indicated she was leaning toward granting a request from Trump’s legal team to appoint a special master to intervene in the ongoing review of documents.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(WASHINGTON) — After three weeks of accusations from former President Donald Trump and his allies that the Justice Department and FBI overreached in their unprecedented August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago, the DOJ responded Tuesday with a late-night filing that laid bare the fruitless negotiations that preceded the raid — and provided ample evidence that in their own legal filing, Trump’s attorneys had left out key details and made multiple unfounded or false claims about the circumstances surrounding the DOJ’s efforts to retrieve classified documents.

Tuesday’s DOJ filing was not just a line-by-line rebuttal of the claims made by Trump and his lawyers that they were fully cooperative all along with department’s efforts to retrieve the records, but it put on full display the extent of the evidence collected so far by investigators in their probe of whether concealment of the documents amounts to obstruction of justice.

Included in the filing were paper exhibits showing the full subpoena sent to Trump’s lawyers, the sworn statement by a Trump lawyer earlier this summer stating they’d handed over all relevant documents, and a high-resolution photo of a pile of documents that was subsequently collected from Trump’s personal office with Top Secret markings.

The filing came in response to Trump’s request that a judge appoint a special master to intervene in investigators’ ongoing review of the items seized from Mar-a-Lago — but some legal experts tell ABC News that Trump’s team may have hurt their own cause.

“One of the greatest self-inflicted wounds is the Trump legal team’s decision, presumably with strong input from their client, deciding to lace their motion for a special master with several falsehoods,” said Ryan Goodman, a professor of law at New York University and former special counsel to the Department of Defense. “Their approach gave the Justice Department a strong reason to publicly set the record straight and issue statements about facts that would otherwise have remained secret due to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

“The Justice Department is usually loath to discuss matters that are under investigation,” Goodman added. “It is rare for the public to get this much visibility into the evidence that is being developed in an ongoing investigation.”

Indeed, Attorney General Merrick Garland has repeatedly said his department will only speak on criminal-related matters through its filings and pleadings in court. Prosecutors, in fact, said in a footnote of the filing that on Monday they had received authorization from D.C. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell to disclose evidence from their ongoing grand jury investigation, including the full copy of a May 11 subpoena that demanded Trump’s team hand over all remaining documents with classifications markings to the government.

Experts said that demonstrates the extent to which officials were willing to go in order to present the fullest version of facts to Judge Aileen Cannon, who will hear arguments Thursday from the government and Trump’s attorneys on the request for a special master.

“I don’t think this was like a calculated effort of, ‘Oh, wow, we have an opportunity here to push back hard and try to debunk all of what Trump has said,'” said Mary McCord, a former top official in DOJ’s National Security Division. “I think it was, you know, we have to respond, we have a court order to respond. The court is obviously going to consider this motion. We’re going to have a hearing and the motion we’re responding to set forth a factual background that is inaccurate, at least according to the government.”

Among other things, the DOJ’s filing directly contradicts the Trump legal team’s account of an in-person visit to Mar-a-Lago on June 3 by a group of FBI agents led by Jay Bratt, the chief of DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.

While Trump’s attorneys said that Bratt was permitted to inspect a storage room containing boxes of items from Trump’s time in the White House, Bratt said in the filing that Trump’s attorneys “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes” to confirm no documents with classified markings remained.

At the end of that visit, the Justice Department said Trump’s attorney provided a sworn statement in response to the subpoena, confirming that all relevant materials had been handed over. The name of the lawyer who signed the statement is redacted, but it was said to have been signed by Trump attorney Christina Bobb, according to reporting from The New York Times.

Neither of the filings from Trump’s legal team requesting the special master made any mention of that statement.

In addition, the DOJ rebutted arguments that Trump’s advisers have been making publicly, including Trump’s claim that he declassified the documents before leaving the White House. The filing said that during negotiations, Trump and his representatives never made any mention of the documents being declassified or subject to executive privilege. In fact, the filing said the documents the DOJ retrieved in June were stored inside a Redweld envelope that was “double-wrapped in tape” — suggesting that the attorney handing them over believed them to be highly sensitive.

The government says that after its June visit, the FBI uncovered “multiple sources of evidence” showing classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago, and that such documents would also be found outside of the storage room.

“The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the filing states. “This included evidence indicating that boxes formerly in the Storage Room were not returned prior to counsel’s review.”

While the latest filing did not spell out specifics about that evidence, it was that pattern of facts, in addition to other evidence of probable cause developed in the investigation, that the DOJ says led it to make the unprecedented decision to move forward in seeking a search warrant of the former president’s residence.

According to the Justice Department, investigators during the August 8 search found more than one hundred documents bearing classification markings ranging from Confidential to Top Secret, as well as “additional sensitive compartments that signify very limited distribution.”

“In some instances, even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys conducting the review required additional clearances before they were permitted to review certain documents,” the department said, noting the search “cast serious doubt” on the claims from Trump’s legal team that “there had been ‘a diligent search’ for records responsive to the grand jury subpoena.”

“That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter,” the filing states.

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(LANSING, Mich.) — The Michigan Board of Canvassers is deadlocked on a bid to add an abortion question on enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution to the November ballot.

Sponsors of the ballot initiative have indicated they would file a lawsuit and ask the courts to order the measure be added to the ballot.

This is a breaking story. Please check back for updates.

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(WASHINGTON) — As states continue to regulate abortion rights across the country, abortion rights groups and state legislatures in Indiana and South Carolina are at odds amid fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

Indiana abortion providers filed a lawsuit in Monroe County Circuit Court on Tuesday seeking to put an end to the state’s abortion ban before it goes into effect on Sept. 15. The South Carolina State House approved a near-total ban on abortion on Wednesday after the state’s Supreme Court temporarily blocked a 6-week ban earlier this month, while the court case moves forward. The House bill now heads to the state Senate for approval.

In a lawsuit, Indiana abortion providers claim the state’s ban, signed into law by Gov. Eric Holcomb on Aug. 5, violates the “fundamental” rights of abortion providers and patients protected under the Indiana Constitution. Indiana was the first state to pass a ban since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe.

The suit alleges the law infringes on residents’ right to privacy, violating Indiana’s guarantee of equal privileges and immunities and violate the Constitution’s due course of law clause because of its unconstitutionally vague language.

The Indiana lawsuit filed against members of the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana and county prosecutors, was filed by Planned Parenthood, the Lawyering Project, the ACLU of Indiana and WilmerHale on behalf of abortion providers including Planned Parenthood, Women’s Med Group Professional Corp and All-Options.

“The abortion ban that the legislature rushed through during a special session — nearly immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — is both dangerous and incredibly cruel,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement.

Indiana’s abortion ban, Senate Bill 1, is a near-total ban on abortion, making it a level 5 felony to provide abortion services, only allowing three exceptions, according to the lawsuit. Providers who violate the ban will have their license revoked and could face between one to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

Under the law, abortions up to certain stages in pregnancy are permitted if the pregnant woman’s life is in danger, the fetus is diagnosed with a fatal anomaly or if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that the ban will “severely limit access to abortion care, prohibiting nearly all pregnant [residents] from accessing care in Indiana.”

If the law goes into effect, “thousands” of Indiana residents who seek abortion care each year will have to disrupt their lives to travel out of state for care, “significantly delaying their abortions and causing them to incur higher expenses,” the lawsuit alleges.

The ban also eliminates abortion clinics in the state, further restricting access, the lawsuit says.

“By slashing the number of facilities providing abortion, which will be limited to hospitals concentrated in and around Indianapolis, S.B. 1 will materially burden even the few people who may qualify for the ban’s extremely limited exceptions,” the lawsuit alleges.

The cost of an abortion procedure increases as the pregnancy advances, so patients pay more for care when they have to wait, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also warns that patients unable to travel will “resort to self-managing their abortion outside of the medical system” or be forced to continue a pregnancy against their will.

The state’s medical licensing board and the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

The South Carolina State House on Wednesday, meanwhile, approved a near-total ban on abortion which only provides exceptions for pregnancies that are a result of rape and incest. If the bill is approved by the State Senate, it would head to the governor’s desk for approval.

In a statement to ABC News, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster’s office said he will “carefully consider any legislation that ultimately reaches his desk, but he believes this is a good starting point for the Senate to begin its deliberations.”

In February 2021, the Republican governor signed a package of bills into law that ban abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected. The ban took effect June 27 — after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The law was temporarily blocked by the South Carolina Supreme Court while justices review a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood in July that alleges the ban is an invasion of privacy and violation of equal protection under the state constitution.

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(NEW YORK) — Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman recently attended a fundraiser in the Hamptons, a previously unreported appearance as he recovers from a stroke and ramps up to face Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz — whom he often attacks as an elitist celebrity versus his blue-collar style.

Photos posted to a public Instagram on Aug. 19 show Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, at a gathering in Amagansett on Long Island.

“Another fun one with our guy #johnfetterman #winning,” Quinn Blackwell wrote in a caption. Blackwell declined to comment when reached by phone; he also made his account private.

An account tagged in the photos, “jamesalexandernyc,” appears to belong to James Alexander, a director at the Cassia Group, according to a Linkedin page with his photo.

According to its website, Cassia Group is a private company that advances projects in various industries abroad, including energy ventures in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

Alexander did not respond to messages from ABC seeking comment, nor did Cassia Group when contacted by phone and email.

Suffolk County records for the address of the Hamptons home show that it was sold by a trust in Alexander’s name to Margaret Street LLC in 2012. Alexander’s name did not appear either in Federal Election Commission campaign finance data or on a list of Fetterman’s individual donors that spanned from June 2021 to June 2022.

A Fetterman campaign spokesperson, Joe Calvello, told ABC in a statement: “The only reason a dude like John would ever go to the Hamptons is because his campaign needs to raise money to fight back against the unprecedented onslaught of attacks and negative ads from Dr. Oz and his rich friends.”

Calvello did not answer specific questions about the fundraiser.

The pictures posted online from the event are standard fare, showing Fetterman — in his traditional hoodie — mingling with a group of people with name tags and posing with others in front of an outdoor pool. And it’s not, of course, unusual for Republicans and Democrats to raise money in the Hamptons during an election year.

Just this summer, according to CNBC, Democratic candidates from across the country attended or were scheduled to attend fundraisers there, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and gubernatorial hopefuls Stacey Abrams, of Georgia, and Wes Moore, of Maryland.

Oz, Fetterman’s opponent, has also spent time in the Hamptons and attended a July 4th weekend “white party” there this summer.

But Fetterman’s stop occurred as he has launched a number of high-profile attacks on Oz, accusing the former TV host of being out-of-touch with everyday voters in Pennsylvania — and more at home in the New York City area and its tony vacation enclaves.

“We just can’t be more different. We have a guy that lives in New Jersey, a guy that has — what is it, nine or 10 houses?” Fetterman told a crowd at a recent event in rural Mercer County, in one of his first in-person campaign appearances after his stroke in May.

Fetterman was in the Hamptons exactly one week after he returned to the trail at an energized rally in Erie as he continues to recover from his stroke. He has had a limited schedule since then, but he appeared at public events on consecutive days over the weekend — the first time he has done so since his health scare.

Some of Fetterman’s supporters downplayed his Hamptons visit.

Geraldine Eckert, who lives in Sharon, Pennsylvania, told ABC News that she wanted to do her own research on the event but said she “wouldn’t hold it against him.”

“If I were putting myself in Fetterman’s shoes, I guess I would go where I thought I could get money for my campaign and I would be honest with my constituents,” she added.

“He’s for the common people. He’s for the middle class. I can identify with him on a much easier scale than I can with any of the Republicans who are out there,” Jack Figaretti, a Democrat, told ABC News outside a campaign event.

Cassia Group, Alexander’s firm, appears to be engaged in business in conflict with some of Fetterman’s campaign issues. Cassia’s website touts work in metal mining and in various aspects of oil production, including “enhanced oil and gas recovery” and drilling. The website also described a 2016 project that involved collaboration with a firm linked to the Kuwaiti national oil company.

Fetterman’s website urges a “transition to clean energy as quickly as possible … in a way that preserves the union way of life for the thousands of workers.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department on Tuesday responded to former President Donald Trump’s call for a “special master” to review materials the FBI seized at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Trump’s lawyers have said the review is needed to deal with matters they argue may be covered by executive privilege.

In their 36-page filing, top department officials laid out in extraordinary detail their efforts to obtain highly classified records they allege were improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago since Trump’s departure from the White House, and the resistance, which they describe outright as obstructive conduct, that they were met with by Trump’s representatives in their efforts to have them handed over.

The government included multiple exhibits to support its argument, including one photo purporting to show an FBI photograph of documents recovered from a container in Trump’s personal office with colored cover sheets showing classification markings including TOP SECRET/SCI, with one showing a marking that appears to refer to information obtained by confidential human sources.

Officials revealed that after they issued a grand jury subpoena to Trump’s attorneys on May 11 to obtain all remaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, “the government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room [at Mar-a-Lago] and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” according to the filing.

“This included evidence indicating that boxes formerly in the Storage Room were not returned prior to counsel’s review,” officials added in the filing, referring to a lawyer for Trump who said all the records from the White House “were stored in one location,” the storage room, and “that there were no other records stored in any private office space or other location at the Premises and that all available boxes were searched.”

The DOJ said in its filing that the subpoena return date was May 24, but Trump’s team asked for an extension that the government initially denied before offering an extension until June 7. A lawyer for Trump contacted the DOJ on June 2 “and requested that FBI agents meet him the following day to pick up responsive documents,” according to the filing.

This gets to the June 3 visit by a small group of FBI agents and Jay Bratt, the head of DOJ’s counterintelligence division, which ABC News has widely reported on. In the filing, the DOJ said the information produced during this visit was “a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, containing the documents,” suggesting that counsel for Trump was handling the documents in a manner that was classified.

“When producing the documents, neither counsel nor the custodian asserted that the former President had declassified the documents or asserted any claim of executive privilege,” the filing said. “Instead, counsel handled them in a manner that suggested counsel believed that the documents were classified: the production included a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, containing the documents.”

In its filing, the DOJ also revealed that during this visit, Trump’s lawyers allowed a visit to the storage room but prohibited government personnel from looking through the boxes that remained in the storage room.

“Critically, however, the former President’s counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to confirm that no documents with classification markings remained,” the filing said.

The DOJ said, “The individual present as the custodian of records produced and provided a signed certification letter.”

The Justice Department on Monday said its team tasked with identifying potential attorney-client privileged materials that were seized in the search on Aug. 8 has already completed its review and is in the process of addressing possible privilege disputes.

Judge Aileen Cannon has indicated she was leaning toward granting a request from Trump’s legal team to appoint a special master to intervene in the ongoing review of documents.

Trump’s lawyers have until Wednesday to file their response to a federal judge.

A hearing is currently set for Thursday at 1 p.m. in West Palm Beach where Judge Cannon will hear arguments from both sides on the request.

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