Donald Trump's legal team thought they were effectively delaying the FBI investigation into the public documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago until the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals stymied their efforts according to a new report.
MSNBC's Yasmin Vossoughian interviewed Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell about the latest in the special master review ordered by controversial Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon.
Vossoughian noted a story Lowell published on Saturday.
"Trump’s goal in requesting a special master was multi-pronged from the start, according to sources familiar with the matter, and the principal – though publicly unstated – aim was to apply the brakes on the criminal investigation, after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago took Trump’s lawyers by surprise," Lowell reported. "Trump effectively secured a two-and-a-half week pause in the criminal investigation from the time that Cannon enjoined the department on Labor Day to the appeals court ruling on Wednesday – a delay that former US attorneys said would not have materially affected the case."
Lowell expanded on his report.
Lowell said, "I've been talking to a couple of Trump advisers, people close to trump's legal team, they say the whole effort to try to get the special master was principally in order to slow down the investigation."
"And that seemed to be working until Wednesday of last week when the 11th Circuit ruled that the one hundred classified documents actually could not part of the special master process and that the Justice Department could regain access to those documents," he explained. "Which means now that federal investigators can move ahead to that criminal investigation."
"The most serious parts of that criminal investigation — the obstruction of justice element and the violation of the Espionage Act, the willful retention of national defense information — those are really, really serious potential charges. The fact the Justice Department has those materials means that Trump's effort to delay this has been effectively stymied."