Former US President Donald Trump has suffered defeat in the US Supreme Court in a dispute over official documents confiscated from his mansion. The Supreme Court in Washington on Thursday rejected Trump’s request to intervene in the case, the court said. Specifically, the question was whether a special expert would have access to around a hundred secret documents confiscated in Trump’s luxury estate Mar-a-Lago in the state of Florida. The court did not give an explanation as to why it rejected the application.
FBI investigators searched Mar-a-Lago on August 8 and confiscated thousands of documents. These are papers Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his term in office, although outgoing presidents are required to turn over all official records to the National Archives.
Trump then went to court and requested that a special expert examine the documents and that the documents be withdrawn from investigators’ access until then. A federal judge in Florida agreed with Trump. The Justice Department then appealed. An appellate court subsequently ordered that the documents classified as secret be withdrawn from the access of the special expert and that federal investigators can continue to evaluate them.
Trump, on the other hand, went to the Supreme Court last week with an urgent motion, but the responsible constitutional judge Clarence Thomas – one of the most conservative judges on the Supreme Court – has now rejected the ex-president’s motion. As is usual in such cases, there was no justification for the decision.
During the Mar-a-Lago raid, the FBI seized dozens of files marked “top secret,” “secret,” or “confidential.” According to media reports, a top-secret document on another country’s nuclear weapons was also found on Trump’s premises.
The ex-president is suspected of violating an espionage law that sets strict standards for the retention of national security documents. US Presidents are required to hand over all official documents, including emails and letters, to the National Archives upon leaving office.
However, Trump describes the raid as politically motivated. He accuses President Joe Biden’s Democrats of abusing the judiciary to prevent him from running for president again in 2024.
