Former President Donald Trump is facing several criminal investigations, at the state and federal levels, that threaten to derail another potential run for president in 2024.
Most of the recent news coverage surrounding the investigations has focused on the FBI’s raid last month of the former president’s Florida home at Mar-a-Lago.
The raid came after federal officials had repeatedly tried to get Trump to return government documents to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) but faced stiff resistance, even though some on the president’s own legal team had urged him to return the documents.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon approved Trump’s request to appoint a special master to oversee the FBI’s audit of materials seized in the raid. Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who served during the Trump administration, has called the request for a special master “a bit of a red herring” because “there doesn’t appear to be” many “documents relating to his private lawyer communications, him as an individual and his outside lawyers.”
The Department of Justice is appealing the ruling to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the FBI needed to continue working to identify classified materials that were seized during the raid.
“This motion is limited to … the seized classified records because those aspects of the order will cause the most immediate and serious harms to the government and the public,” the department said in its court filing.
Federal prosecutors suggested in the filing that there might be classified information missing from the material that was seized at Mar-a-Lago.
“Without a stay, the government and the public will also suffer irreparable harm from the undue delay to the criminal investigation,” prosecutors wrote. “The injunction against using classified records in the criminal investigation could impede efforts to identify the existence of any additional classified records that are not being properly stored — which itself presents the potential for ongoing risk to national security.”
Trump is also facing a criminal investigation related to his business dealings in New York, a criminal investigation in Georgia over alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and a second federal investigation over the events surrounding the January 6 riot and alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The latest development regarding the federal investigation into his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election came on Thursday when The New York Times reported that a federal grand jury was investigating Trump’s Save America PAC.
The federal grand jury issued subpoenas seeking information about the inner workings of the organization as the former president solicited millions of dollars while making spurious claims about the election.
The report suggested that this might be a new criminal investigation as the new subpoenas “appeared to have been issued by a different grand jury than the one that has been gathering evidence about” other alleged efforts by the former president to overturn the results of the election.
The investigation is believed to be looking into “whether [Save America PAC] had duped donors through misleading appeals about election fraud.”