Former US president Donald Trump, pictured in Orlando, Florida in 2021, wants an outside party to review the government's screening of documents seized from his home by federal agentsWASHINGTON - An increasingly high-stakes standoff between Donald Trump and federal investigators lands in court Thursday, after days of headline-grabbing revelations surrounding highly classified documents seized by the FBI from the former president's Florida home.
It also prompted a searing disclosure by the Justice Department of the evidence against the Republican former president recovered from the search of his Mar-a-Lago residence in south Florida last month. The filing also stated that FBI agents located classified documents in Trump's desk drawers with his passports.
And the claim of obstructing the FBI search piles further legal pressure on the former president, who denies all wrongdoing.The two sides are expected to wrangle over the scope of the review and whether it will determine if parts of the cache are covered by"privilege" that can shield some presidential and attorney-client communications from investigation.
Trump's latest legal filing on Wednesday didn't address the most damaging aspects of the government's potential obstruction case and did not claim that he declassified the documents while he was in office.