Justice Department lawyers asked Judge Aileen Cannon to force Trump to confirm documents seized from Mar-a-Lago in a sworn affidavit.
The Justice Department asked Judge Cannon to compel Trump to affirm or dispute the records seized under penalty of perjury in a 20-page unsealed filing on Monday dated November 8.
“The Special Master has received an affidavit of accuracy from the government. Since the Court appointed the Special Master to ensure fairness, integrity, and even-handedness in the review process […], Plaintiff should be required to verify or correct the property inventory just as the government has done,” the Justice Department’s National Security Division chief Jay I. Bratt wrote in a 20-page filing, Law & Crime reported.
Judge Cannon previously shielded Trump from having to verify the documents seized by the FBI.
However Justice Department lawyers argued Judge Cannon’s order to shield Trump was just temporary.
“The Court’s September 29 , 2022 order did not disagree in principle with the requirement that Plaintiff verify or correct the property inventory,” the DOJ’s filing states, according to Law & Crime. “Rather, the Court relieved Plaintiff from the requirement to verify or correct the inventory before he had an opportunity to review the seized materials.”
“Now that Plaintiff has reviewed the seized materials and claimed the overwhelming majority of them to be his personal records, considerations of fairness, integrity, and evenhandedness require Plaintiff to do what the government has done — namely, verify the property inventory or correct it if he believes it to be in error,” the filing said. “A fair process requires both parties to ensure that the Special Master is adjudicating disputes over property actually seized from Mar-a-Lago.”
Justice Department lawyers are pushing for Trump to verify the documents to set up a perjury trap.
The Washington Times reported:
The Justice Department urged a federal judge to force former President Donald Trump to confirm whether the FBI’s list of classified materials and other documents seized in the raid of his South Florida home is correct before an independent arbitrator decides whether any of the materials should be off-limits to federal prosecutors.
In a 20-page legal filing unsealed Monday, the Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon to compel Mr. Trump to file a sworn affidavit detailing the materials seized during the FBI’s August raid of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
Lawyers for the government said the affidavit is critical to push back against unsupported claims by Mr. Trump that agents may have planted some of the documents with “classified” and “top secret” while they were searching his Palm Beach, Florida residence.
Trump is expected to announce his 2024 White House run on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the Democrat-media complex is pushing for Trump to be indicted for non-crimes related to documents seized by the FBI.
