Trump’s legal team says the FBI took 200,000 pages of documents from Mar-a-Lago

Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers have revealed in a new court filing that the FBI seized around 200,000 documents from his Mar-A-Lago residence, which were contained within 11,000 documents. 

Over 100 of the documents were reportedly classified or highly classified.

This information came to light in a letter from Trump lawyers to the special master who examined the seized documents. Trump’s lawyers hit out at what they said was an “overly optimistic and aggressive” timeline for a review of documents, citing the sheer number of documents as justification to allocate more time to the process.

“Plaintiff respectfully suggests that Your Honor and the parties will be best served by having the retained vendor convey a supportable timeframe for scanning roughly 200,000 pages into a platform,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, per the Washington Examiner. “It would be better to base deadlines on actual data and not wistful claims by the Government.”

Trump’s team also said that finding a vendor that can scan the roughly 11,000 documents, which total some 200,000 pages of material, and upload them to a system for the parties involved to review has been somewhat of an arduous task.

They went on to explain that the “rough rule of thumb” for reviewing documents is that one can read about 50 pages per hour, they have said that this should raise even more doubt on the timeline sought by the government.

“The overall position of the Government continues to be overly optimistic and aggressive in terms of the timing of productions and Plaintiff’s review, which is why Plaintiff respectfully renews his position that mid-October is a realistic final production deadline,” Trump’s lawyers stated.

Trump’s lawyers said that mid-October is a “realistic final production deadline,” whereas the Department of Justice believes that the scanning process could be completed by Oct. 7.

A federal appeals court last week gave the green light to Department of Justice to resume using the classified documents that were seized from Mar-a-Lago in its investigation.

The Department of Justice is currently investigating Trump for allegedly taking classified government records and failing to return them back to the National Archives and Records Administration when he left the White House.

The Department of Justice said that Trump was not within his rights to invoke executive privilege over any of the documents in his residence as he is no longer President.