Former US President Donald Trump has been granted till Friday to refine the legal reasons in his request for a special master to oversee the assessment of evidence acquired during the Mar-a-Lago raid by a federal judge in Florida.

District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida ordered Trump’s lawyers to explain their arguments for why the court has the authority to intervene at this time, explain exactly what Trump is requesting, and whether the Justice Department has been served with Trump’s special master motion.

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Cannon also asked Trump’s team to comment on the impact of the request on a separate review being performed by a magistrate judge to determine if any portions of the still-sealed FBI affidavit laying out the probable cause for the search can be published.

The judge’s order highlights many of the ways in which Trump’s complaint fell short of what would be expected of a court submission asking for the appointment of a special master—especially in a search as high-stakes as the one the FBI conducted at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

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“What’s she saying is, ‘What are you doing in front of me?’” Mark Schnapp, a criminal defence lawyer in Florida who worked for the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida for seven years said.

Outside legal experts were also perplexed by Trump’s decision to file a separate lawsuit assigned to Judge Cannon rather than file the request with the magistrate judge who signed off on the warrant. Trump’s lawyers appear to have run into procedural snags with the filing of the complaint and their attempts to enter appearances in the case.

In general, Trump’s request for a special master to analyse the evidence collected from his Florida estate is not unusual under the law. When the FBI raided Cohen’s office and residences in 2018, his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, successfully sought the appointment of a special master.

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But Trump waited two weeks to make such a request, raising questions given how advanced the Justice Department is expected to be in assessing what it recovered at Mar-a-Lago.

The Justice Department is doing the assessment with the help of a “taint team,” which is a group of prosecutors who are not involved in the investigation and who filter out materials that should not be given to investigators.

When Trump did file his request with the court, the complaint was heavy on political charges and low on the type of legal argument that would explain to a court why it should intervene and what authority it had to do so. When Trump’s lawyers did reference the court rules that they said gave the judge the right to accept the request, they did so without explaining why those rules should be applied in the context of a criminal search.

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Trump also did not file a separate request with the lawsuit, such as a motion for a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction, which would have accelerated the schedule for the judge to evaluate what Trump was asking for.

Moreover, Trump’s legal team did not provide any declarations – that is, statements from the lawyers who were supposed to have spoken with the Justice Department before and during the search – to back up the complaint’s factual accusations.

Instead, the complaint rehashes charges regarding the FBI’s investigation into Russian election meddling in 2016, while sensationally implying that the DOJ’s actions were driven by a desire to stymie a Trump presidential bid in 2024. It also includes the complete text of a threat Trump allegedly attempted to give to Attorney General Merrick Garland through his lawyers.

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According to Schnapp, Trump’s submission on Monday read more like a political statement than a legal document.

“They really didn’t ask for anything. That’s the craziness,” Schnapp said. “They didn’t ask for anything to be done in the immediate future to slow it down, even though that’s what they claimed to be doing”

Outside legal experts were also perplexed by Trump’s decision to file a separate lawsuit assigned to Judge Cannon rather than file the request with the magistrate judge who signed off on the warrant. Trump’s lawyers appear to have run into procedural snags with the filing of the complaint and their attempts to enter appearances in the case.

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According to the court’s local regulations, the clerk entered one notice on the docket indicating that the complaint was “filed conventionally” when it “should have been filed electronically.”

Another letter from the clerk stated that the Trump attorneys who sought special admission to enter appearances in the case since they were not barred in Florida did so in violation of local laws. They were given another chance to appropriately enter their appearances.