Mar-a-Lago files: Are some Americans more equal than others in the eyes of the law?

Are all Americans equal before the law? Or are there special exemptions or privileges available to former presidents, such as Donald Trump due to their reputations?

These were among the questions being asked by academics, lawyers and Democratic politicians in the wake of a key legal ruling this week in relation to the discovery of classified documents at Trump’s club and residence, Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

A month after the FBI raided the premises and took away 18 documents marked as top secret, 54 marked as secret, 31 marked as confidential as well as more than 40 empty folders marked as having held classified material, legal sparring between Trump and the US department of justice is continuing.

In the fallout from the raid, Trump has also injected himself back into the centre of American politics just at a time, in the lead in to crucial mid-term elections in November, strategists in his Republican Party wanted to focus on the economy and inflation and what they contend as the failures of the Biden administration.

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What this will all mean for Republican hopes to take control of the House of Representatives and potentially the US senate remain to be seen.

In the meantime, in addition to the investigations over the documents at Mar-a-Lago, the separate inquiries into the January 6th riot by his supporters at the US Capitol and his call to officials in Georgia to find 11,000 votes after the presidential election, Trump may now also be facing further potential troubles.

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On Thursday it emerged that the department of justice is interested in what has been going on at the fundraising vehicle Trump established after he lost the presidential election in 2020, which has generated staggering amounts of money.

The New York Times reported that a federal grand jury is examining the establishment of, and spending by, the Save America PAC.

At a hearing of the congressional committee investigating the January 6th attacks last June, California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, set out claims that the Save America PAC and Trump’s campaign raised $250 million after the election by claiming there had been widespread fraud.

“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” Lofgren said. “So not only was there the big lie, there was the big rip-off.”

However in the immediate term the focus is still on the documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago.

The former president went to court to seek to have appointed an Independent assessor — what is known technically as a special master — to go through all the material seized. He wanted the outside third party to determine whether any of the documents were shielded by the legal doctrines of lawyer/client privilege or executive privilege.

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[ Empty folders marked classified included in material seized at Trump’s home ]

Critics of Trump argued the move was aimed at delaying the department of justice investigation into how highly classified documents came to be taken from the White House and stored at his beach club — a venue that markets itself as being at the epicentre of the social scene in Palm Beach and which is not only open to its fee-paying members but also available to rent for weddings, gala and private parties.

The ruling on the special master when it was delivered by Judge Aileen Cannon, who was a Trump appointee to the bench, caused a sensation.

As did new reporting from the Washington Post which maintained that one of the documents seized set out the military defences of a foreign Government including its nuclear capabilities. There are not too many nations with nuclear weapons and some of these are US allies.

The report said the document was so highly sensitive that only the president and those at Cabinet rank or close to that level could authorise other government officials to know about what it contained.

There has still been no definitive account given by Trump and his allies as to what classified documents found in containers and in desks were actually doing at Mar-a Lago.

The defence by Trump and his supporters continues to evolve.

Initially there were claims the material was planted by the FBI. Later there were assertions Trump needed them for a book for his future presidential library. There were then moves to downplay the importance of the issue altogether. Trump claimed to have simply declassified all of them — although critics argue this would have involved a process in his administration that was not carried out.

Last week one of his lawyers contended the whole controversy was just like a dispute over an overdue library book. This week’s claim was that it was all just about “a storage issue”.

Judge Cannon, as expected, allowed the appointment of the special master sought by Trump. However the terms of her judgment caused consternation among some lawyers and politicians.

She suggested that an investigation of a former president needed greater safeguards because of potential reputational issues at play.

“As a function of plaintiff’s former position as president of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own,” she wrote. “A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.”

This immediately raised questions as to whether every American was equal before the law. And, if so, how come other citizens facing FBI investigations do not have the same exemptions applied to them?

The judge ordered a halt to the use of the seized materials as part of the department of justice investigation but allowed the intelligence community to continue separately to assess whether the documents found at Mar-a-Lago posed a national security risk. Critics of the ruling argued that the differentiation could be unworkable as the FBI was a part of the intelligence community.

While the judge’s decision was welcomed by Trump his former attorney general Bill Barr was less enthused.

“The opinion, I think, was wrong, and I think the government should appeal it. It’s deeply flawed in a number of ways,” Barr told Fox News.”I don’t think the appointment of a special master is going to hold up.”

On Thursday the department of justice hit back and formally asked the judge to to revisit her decision to temporarily stop prosecutors from accessing the classified documents seized from Trump’s residence.

The department maintained her ruling was hindering the government’s effort to determine whether national security had been compromised.

In a pair of filings in federal court, lawyers for the department announced their intention to appeal key parts of Judge Cannon’s decision from earlier in the week. They said they would ask an appeals court to block those sections of her order if she did not agree to do so herself by next Thursday.

Prosecutors asked Judge Cannon to allow investigators to continue to use “classified records — a discrete set of just over 100 documents” and to withhold them from the special master.

They argued that determining the national security implications of the retention of the documents by the former president was so intertwined with its criminal investigation that carrying out a separate risk assessment was impossible under the conditions imposed by the court.

The department of justice lawyers contended that the judge’s order was impeding efforts to determine whether there may yet be “additional classified records that are not being properly stored” and noted that the search had found empty folders marked as classified whose contents “may have been lost or compromised.”