Justice Department  lawyers have said that 300 pages of legal documents which include settlements, non-disclosure agreements and retainers should be returned to former US President Donald Trump, according to a report unsealed by a US judge on Monday.

The report details the kind of documents FBI agents found during the August raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and the steps taken by federal investigators to identify documents that the government should not access.

The unsealed report was a status update from the Justice Department’s “privilege review” team which has been going over the seized documents.  There are a total of roughly 11,000 documents, which total around 200,000 pages, according to Trump’s lawyers.

Also Read | Donald Trump goes to Supreme Court over Mar-a-Lago raid and document seizure

Since then, a judge appointed a “special master” to view the seized documents for protected information like executive privileges that former presidents get and attorney-client communications. Government lawyers have argued that they’ve already done the work. 

The government’s filter team was instructed to put aside a box “potentially privileged” materials should the documents inside qualify, the unsealed report showed. In addition, the team took a “broad view” of documents that could be considered privileged, including material that mentioned a lawyer or anything that looked like a “legal document.”

The filter team had looked through the basement storage room where the documents were kept as well as Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago. A total of six boxes were initially kept at the FBI’s Washington office, after which a seventh box of documents was added to the pile as member of the case team found a document with a law firm’s letterhead in a pile of newspapers. 

The contents of the boxes were divided into two categories. The first set contained 138 pages of documents which weren’t likely to fall under legal work privileges, like “government records, public documents and communications to or from third parties.”

The other set contained 383 pages that the filter team said should be returned to the former US president as they didn’t seem to be government records and weren’t of importance to the investigating team, though a government lawyer did note that legal-documents did not necessarily fall under the privileged category.