The US Justice Department on Thursday appealed a Florida judge's order to freeze access to thousands of documents, including top secret files, seized from former President Donald Trump's home, AFP reported.
The department said the order issued on Monday by federal court Judge Aileen Cannon to sequester all the documents for review by an independent "special master" hindered its ability to conduct criminal investigation related to Trump's possession of the classified documents.
It asked Cannon to set aside her freeze on just over 100 classified documents seized in the August 8 raid on Trump's Florida home and to keep them from the hands of any special master named to examine the seized materials.
The papers are part of an ongoing FBI criminal investigation into unauthorized possession of national defense information, which comes under the Espionage Act, and Trump has no claim over them, the department said in its filing.
"The classified records are the very subject of the government's ongoing investigation," it said, according to AFP.
Last month's unprecedented FBI raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home saw thousands of government records, including the highly classified materials, retrieved.
A recent New York Times report indicated that the US government recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mar-a-Lago.
According to the report, the classified documents included material from the CIA, the National Security Agency and the FBI.
On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents during the search of Trump’s home.