An 11th Circuit federal appeals court last night told the DoJ to continue looking at documents marked as classified that were seized from the Mango Mussolini’s Mar-a-Lago beach club. The emergency intervention upends Judge Aileen "Loose" Cannon's order over those documents that blocked federal investigators’ work, and basically said "whatevs" to Trump's claim they were declassified. All in all, a satisfying piece of legal work. Via CNN:

A special master’s review of that subset of about 100 records, which would’ve allowed Trump’s legal team to see them, is now partially stopped. The special master, Judge Raymond Dearie, is able to continue his work reviewing the rest of the material seized from Mar-a-Lago, to make sure records belonging to Trump or that he may be able to claim are confidential aren’t used by investigators. “It is self-evident that the public has a strong interest in ensuring that the storage of the classified records did not result in ‘exceptionally grave damage to the national security,’” the three-judge panel from the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals stated.

“Ascertaining that necessarily involves reviewing the documents, determining who had access to them and when, and deciding which (if any) sources or methods are compromised.” Throughout the litigation, Trump’s lawyers have raised vague questions about whether the materials are in fact classified. But they have not straightforwardly asserted in court that the former President declassified them, even as Trump himself has claimed outside of court that he did.

Wednesday night, the appeals court panel called Trump’s legal team out. “Plaintiff suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President,” the court wrote. “But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified. And before the special master, Plaintiff resisted providing any evidence that he had declassified any of these documents.”