Donald Trump has found himself in no small number of political and litigious showdowns as of late, as a number of rather serious cases against him continue to make their way through the vast court system of the United States.
The latest trouble to to come his way arrives in the fallout of an FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago home, as the 11th circuit court pushes back on his claims regarding the documents that were seized.
A federal appeals court appeared deeply skeptical Tuesday that former President Donald Trump was entitled to challenge an FBI search of his Florida estate or to have an independent arbiter review documents that were seized from the home.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, including two Trump appointees, repeatedly suggested Trump was seeking special treatment in asking that the “special master” conduct an independent inspection of records taken in the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
“Other than the fact that this involves a former president, everything else about this is indistinguishable from any pre-indictment search warrant,” said William Pryor, the court’s chief judge, a George W. Bush appointee.
There was more where that came from.
He added: “We’ve got to be concerned about the precedent that we would create that would allow any target of a federal criminal investigation to go into a district court and to have a district court entertain this kind of petition … and interfere with the executive branch’s ongoing investigation.”
Trump has made several rather strong suggestions regarding the unprecedented raid, including assertion that the FBI may have “planted” evidence at the scene, and that all of the documents in questions had already been declassified by Trump himself.
