(NewsNation) — Former President Donald Trump’s legal team Monday night resisted a request to elaborate on his claims around declassifying the documents recovered last month from his Mar-a-Lago home.
In a filing to the court-appointed special master that Trump requested, his attorneys said the “time and place” for making such a disclosure would come in a motion in a criminal trial as an effort to recover his property.
“Otherwise, the Special Master process will have forced the Plaintiff to fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident in the District Court’s order,” Trump’s legal team wrote.
The resistance comes after Trump’s attorneys insinuated the former president declassified the more than 300 documents recovered from his Florida home but stopped short of fully making the claim in court filings.
The filing from the Trump team was part of proposals by both them and the Justice Department on a system for the special master to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
In her order naming Raymond Dearie as the independent third party to examine the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon set a deadline of Nov. 30 to complete the review. There are some 11,000 documents for Dearie to study.
In a filing Monday, prosecutors suggested documents be uploaded to an online platform so both teams can evaluate the records at the same time. The Justice Department also proposed that the third-party vendor “batch out” documents on a rolling basis, which would allow about 500 to be processed each day.
Both the DOJ and Trump’s legal team recommended regular status meetings with Dearie to resolve any questions and ensure the review was staying on track.
The Justice Department also submitted a proposed protective order that would make leaking details of the special master review “punishable by contempt of court or any other legally available sanction that the Court deems appropriate.”
Prosecutors have appealed part of Cannon’s ruling, asking the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to block Dearie from viewing approximately 100 classified documents that were found in the Aug. 8 search. Trump’s team has a deadline of Tuesday at noon Eastern time to respond to the appeal.
“If the Eleventh Circuit does not stay the review of the documents with classification markings, the government will propose a way forward,” the DOJ said in its filing.
A preliminary conference with Dearie, the DOJ and Trump’s team set is set for Tuesday.
The Hill contributed to this report.