reporter katelyn is working the story for us. what are you learning? this comes as the justice department continues to ratchet up the pressure on donald trump as part of their criminal investigation around what happened to documents from the trump presidency that the former president apparently kept with him in different places after he left office. so, wolf, the ways this arose is in may, there had been a subpoena for documents from trump where the justice department didn t believe that they had gotten everything. there was that search we saw at mar-a-lago in august where they were collecting more documents being kept by trump. and there continued to be these questions the justice department had. do we have everything? they kept wanting to get more. they kept wanting to believe that there may be still documents that donald trump had in his possession. so this went into court, very confidentially. it was all sealed. and just recently there were
i do think it raises a lot of questions. this whole filing, when you look at it, so much of it really is just a continuation of trump s rhetoric on social media. it really leads to a lot of questions about what kind of legal advice he s really getting and whether or not this is in the interest of protecting him legally or in the interest of really continuing this argument publicly that this is a political prosecution. a very interesting piece of back-channeling and implications of what the intent was with the message to the doj. everyone stay with me, stand by. we have a lot more to discuss on this breaking news. we ll be right back. browse for cars that f fit your budget, then customize your downpapayme and monthly payment. and these aren t made up numbers, it s what you ll really pay, right down to the penny. wheather you re shopping or just looking, it only takes a few seconds and it won t affect your credit score.
by the fbi? that s exactly right, alex. what s happening here is donald trump is going to court to try to slow down this criminal investigation following the seizure of all of those boxes at mar-a-lago. he s asking yes, indeed, for a special master. so a third party lawyer who would typically be appointed by the court to come in and make sure the justice department didn t take any documents that they re not supposed to as they use them as evidence in their on going investigation. but not just that appointment is what he s asking for. he s also asking to put a pause on everything until that appointment comes through. that s a very key thing here, a pause, that would elongate the justice department s work if it were granted. then he s also asking for a couple more things. he wants more information about exactly what was seized from his property. he wants anything returned that the government shouldn t have as the special master does their review if they get to do it. he s also making s
he s saying he had constitutional rights that may have been violated. he wants to also protect privileges he may have as a former president. he says in this filing, his lawyers write, this matter has captured the attention of the american public. merely adequate safeguards are not affectable when the matter involves not only the constitutional rights of president trump but also the executive privilege. trump, the movement submits that the appointment of a special master is the only appropriate action here. alex. katelyn, we ve got the motion, almost 30 pages long. when you read through it, what narrative do you see jumping out that the trump team is trying to present in this document, especially when it comes to the events that led up to the search at mar-a-lago? one of the surprising things is we do have a narrative that donald trump s team was filling out about what was happening between his team and the justice department and what trump himself was even doing and the
successful? alex, i think there s a few things they re trying to accomplish. on the surface they ve asked for the appointment of a special master, a neutral third party who would come in and review all the materials that were seized to make sure there s not things in there that are privileged, either attorney-client privileged or potentially presidential privilege, things that should not be included in the investigation. that s not a crazy thing to ask for. it s pretty reasonable in a high-profile case like this. i would expect they have a pretty good chance of getting that granted if they made the motion in a timely fashion, which may not be the case. with two weeks having elapsed in the aftermath of the search, it s entirely possible that the fbi and the justice department have already been through the materials. if they had, i would strongly suspect they probably used a taint team which is essentially an internal group of lawyers and agents who are not on the