Trump's lawyers ask judge to block DOJ's request for access to classified records in new filing that experts say is heavy on 'rhetorical outrage'

• Trump's lawyers asked a judge to reject the DOJ's request for access to classified records seized from Mar-a-Lago.
• But the filing was heavy on "rhetorical outrage" and featured "next to nothing new," legal experts said.

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump urged a federal judge on Monday to continue preventing the FBI from reviewing more than 100 classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, in the latest salvo against the Justice Department's criminal inquiry into Trump's handling of national security information.

In a 21-page court filing, Trump's lawyers described the ongoing investigation as "unprecedented and misguided" while suggesting that some of the documents in question might not be classified and dismissing the Justice Department's concerns about potential national security risks.

"In what at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control, the Government wrongfully seeks to criminalize the possession by the 45th President of his own Presidential and personal records," Trump's lawyers said.

But DOJ veterans and national security experts panned the filing, with one former federal prosecutor saying it contained "next to nothing new" and was heavy on "rhetorical outrage" instead of substantive legal arguments.

Notably, the filing did not address Trump's repeated claim that he had previously declassified all the records that were recovered from Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, though the former president has frequently said via Truth Social and other public statements that he had a "standing order" to declassify all the records that were moved to Mar-a-Lago, more than a dozen of his former aides told CNN they had no knowledge of such an order, and Trump's legal team has not made the claim in any of its filings.

The filing only says that the government "has not proven" the records with classified markings were still classified, adding that "this issue is to be determined later."

The former federal prosecutor Harry Litman pointed that out, saying the filing has an entire section about the president's authority to declassify documents "but no assertion that he did."

"This must have been worked out delicately [between] Trump and his lawyers, who didn't want to be on the hook for lying to the court," Litman added.

The Trump team's focus on whether the documents in question were classified or not also misses the point; none of the three laws, including the Espionage Act, that he's being investigated for violating depend on the classificaton of the records at issue.

Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer in Washington, DC, also noted the former president's team "repeatedly dances around the declassification issue but NEVER says he actually declassified them."

In all, Moss said, Trump's legal argument centers around the Presidential Records Act and the claim that "no statute can supersede it," and that even if it could, "Trump had declassification authority."

"This argument won't fly in the long run but it's their ongoing PR move," he added.

Monday's filing came a week after Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, granted the former president's request to have an outside arbiter — known as a special master — review the more than 11,000 records retrieved from Mar-a-Lago. In their filing Monday, Trump's lawyers pushed back against the Justice Department's proposal for Cannon to suspend a key part of her ruling and allow investigators access to a "discrete set of just over 100 classified documents."