Trump Secures Historic Four-Month Delay Of Classified Documents Probe Before His Own Appointee Reluctantly Returns The Boxes To The FBI
FORT PIERCE, Fla. Federal Judge Aileen Cannon, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, formally dismissed Trump's lawsuit on Monday, bringing a triumphant close to a four-month campaign in which the former president successfully prevented the government from examining the classified records it had removed from his beach club, right up until the moment it was permitted to examine them.
The dismissal capped a legal strategy that observers described as visionary in its ambition: the proposition that a private citizen found in possession of hundreds of documents marked classified may, upon their discovery, ask a court to return the documents to him for safekeeping. Trump had petitioned in August for a neutral special master to review the materials seized from Mar-a-Lago on August 8, and Cannon obliged, naming retired Judge Raymond Dearie and instructing the Justice Department to pause its criminal review while the sorting proceeded.
"A president can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking about it," Trump had explained in a television interview, articulating a doctrine of executive power that he continued to assert after leaving office and after the documents in question had been physically transported to Florida. The argument was unanimously rejected on December 1 by a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, two of whom Trump had personally placed on the bench, in a ruling observing that the court "cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant."
By the time Cannon entered the order closing the case she had agreed to open, the former president had obtained nearly everything the lawsuit was realistically built to obtain, which was time. For roughly four months, investigators reviewing tens of thousands of records, including about 100 marked as classified, were obliged to wait while the question of whether any individual may indefinitely halt a federal investigation was answered, at length and in writing, in the negative.
A source familiar with the former president's legal thinking described the result as a clean win, noting that the documents had been kept from the FBI for a stretch previously believed impossible and that the underlying precedent, though struck down, had been satisfying to assert. Trump himself characterized the entire proceeding as a continuation of the greatest witch hunt in American history, a description he has applied to every phase of the litigation, including the phases he won.
At press time, the former president was reportedly weighing a bold new theory under which the documents, having now been returned to the government, technically belonged to him again.