By Dareh Gregorian —
NBC News
The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump's attorneys face off Thursday in federal court in Florida for the first time since FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.
Trump's attorneys are asking Judge Aileen Cannon to appoint a special inspector to review evidence seized in the Aug. 8 search.
They also demand to know the affidavit that justified the judicial search in their residence in Florida.
“The government must provide the special inspector and Trump with a copy of the seized materials, a copy of the search warrant, and an unredacted copy of the application materials,” their attorneys said in a court filing Wednesday.
“If left unchecked, the DOJ will impugn, leak, and publish selective aspects of its investigation with no recourse for the plaintiff, other than relying in some way on the self-control of now-unchecked investigators,” they said.
The Department of Justice alleges that the special inspector that Trump requested "would harm national security"
Aug. 31, 202201:50
A judge last week ordered the release of a heavily redacted version of the affidavit, which showed that investigators had found classified documents in boxes that Trump returned to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in January, after having been out of office for more than a year.
Twenty-five of those documents were marked top secret, and many more were labeled secret or confidential, the filing says.
The portions of the affidavit that remain redacted explain how and why the FBI came to believe that Trump still had a large number of documents in his Florida club.
Justice Department officials said Tuesday that putting a special inspector into the mix "is unnecessary and would significantly harm important government interests, including national security interests."
They ask the judge not to accept that an independent expert review documents found in Mar-a-Lago
Aug. 31, 202202:03
Federal agents have completed their review of the record evidence, and intelligence officials are conducting their own damage assessment, according to the Justice Department.
A special review of the more than 100 classified documents found in the August 8 search "would prevent the intelligence community from conducting its ongoing review of the national security risk that improper storage of these highly sensitive materials may have caused." and to identify the measures to rectify or mitigate any damage that improper storage has caused, ”says the document from the Department of Justice.
In a separate filing on Monday, the government said it had "identified a limited set of materials that may contain attorney-client privilege, had completed its review of those materials, and is in the process of following the procedures" set forth in the search warrant affidavit “to address possible disputes, if any.”
Trump's attorneys downplayed the large number of secret documents in his filing, and investigators' allegation that they had failed to turn over sensitive documents even after being served with a subpoena to do so and after one of Trump's attorneys Trump swore in June that all the documents sought had been returned.
Republican Senator Roy Blunt admits Trump did wrong by withholding documents at Mar-a-Lago
Aug. 28, 202200:38
“The alleged justification for the initiation of this criminal investigation was the alleged discovery of sensitive information contained in the 15 boxes of presidential records.
But this discovery was entirely predictable given the very nature of the presidential archives.
Quite simply, the idea that presidential records contain sensitive information should never have been cause for alarm," Trump's lawyers wrote.