“No extension is permitted,” Judge Adalberto Jordan wrote, indicating that he had consulted with Chief Justice William Pryor on the plan.
No date was set Wednesday for oral argument, but Adalberto’s order said a “special committee on the merits” would be assigned to the case.
The legal battle over documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida has now proliferated in four arenas: the Florida courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who first approved the former president’s request for a special master; the Brooklyn courtroom of the special master she appointed, Senior Judge Raymond Dearie; the Atlanta 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.
Last Tuesday, Trump drew the Supreme Court into the fray, asking Judge Clarence Thomas, who oversees the 11th Circuit, to restore Dearie’s authority to review about 100 documents with classification marks.
The multiple moving parts and how they interact with each other have complicated the status of Trump’s legal case, even as it has largely left the Justice Department free to move forward with its criminal investigation into his handling of highly-recorded documents. sensitive recovered from his estate.
Dearie is currently reviewing 11,000 unclassified documents seized by the FBI during its Aug. 8 raid of the Mar-a-Lago premises, and he had asked Trump for evidence to support his claims that the FBI may have manipulate evidence. Cannon, however, denied Dearie’s request for the information and extended the timeline for the review at Trump’s urging.
A panel of three 11th Circuit judges, meanwhile, recently dealt Cannon its own setback, reversing its decision to include 100 documents with classification marks in Dearie’s review and directing the Department of Justice. It’s the decision that Trump’s team is seeking to have partially stopped in the Supreme Court.
The 11th Circuit has an unusually large number of Trump appointees. Six of the 11 active justices were selected by Trump and seven of them are appointed by Republicans.
Adalberto, who issued the scheduling order on Wednesday, is an appointee of President Barack Obama. Pryor was nominated by President George HW Bush. Cannon is a Trump appointee and Dearie was an appointee by President Ronald Reagan.