A federal judge made public a more detailed list of the materials the FBI took from former President Donald Trump's Florida estate on Friday ahead of a highly anticipated decision on whether to appoint a third party to review the documents.
The inventory list, provided by the Justice Department at the judge's request days earlier as an expansion to an earlier list, gives further detail on the materials seized and confirms reports that personal items were commingled among documents marked as classified.
The document, marked "Exhibit A" details the contents of 33 items - boxes, containers or documents - taken from an office or a storage room in the search, revealing that among documents with "secret," "top secret" and "confidential" markings were items including books, magazine and newspaper articles dated from 2008-2020, "clothing/gift items" and empty folders, some of which were marked with "classified" banners.
Last week, in its first court filings since the Aug. 8 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's team asked a federal judge to appoint a special master to review the seized documents. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon expressed "preliminary intent" to grant the former president's request for a special master last weekend and ordered the Justice Department to submit a response to Trump's request and file under seal a more detailed account of what was taken in the search. After hearing arguments from Trump's team and the Justice Department on Thursday, the judge made the document public.
The move comes as the judge weighs whether to appoint a special master to review, appearing to signal that she would do so during a hearing on Thursday, despite the Justice Department's assertion in court filings earlier this week that appointing a third party would be "unnecessary" and "would significantly harm important government interests, including national security interests."
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