According to The Epoch Times, the legal team of former President Donald Trump is arguing in court that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has violated Trump’s attorney-client privilege for at least the third time.
The FBI is said to have done so while handling the documents it seized during its unprecedented raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
Background
It has been reported that there were privileged documents among those seized by the FBI during its raid and that some of these privileged documents were protected by the attorney-client privilege.
Privileged material is material that is not discoverable during the legal process. The attorney-client privilege, in particular, is a rule in the American legal system that protects against the disclosure of confidential communications that take place between a lawyer and his or her client.
After seizing the documents from Trump’s residence, the FBI is said to have set up a filter process to stop FBI agents from violating privileged material by viewing it.
The government has already acknowledged in court filings that this filtering process has failed twice — that agents viewed material they were not supposed to view.
Now, we have what appears to be a third violation.
The latest
In a new court filing, it is revealed that Department of Justice (DOJ) officials have informed Trump’s legal team that FBI agents broke Trump’s attorney-client privilege for a third time.
The Epoch Times reports:
FBI agents viewed an email that they sent to the Privilege Review Team, a team that was supposed to filter out all potentially privileged materials before agents were able to view any.
There, however, appears to be a dispute between the DOJ and Trump’s legal team about whether the material actually is protected by the attorney-client privilege or not. Trump and his people say that it is and the DOJ says otherwise.
It remains to be seen how U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon will handle the situation.
Cannon has expressed skepticism about the FBI’s claim that its filter process is working, saying that, “on more than one occasion, the Privilege Review Team’s initial screening failed to identify potentially privileged material.”