Trump hires ‘knife fighter’ attorney to fight his Mar-a-Lago case

Former President Donald Trump is beefing up his legal team as he digs in for a long fight against the government over documents the FBI seized during its raid of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

The former president, who spent Tuesday in a tweet storm attacking the FBI after calling for a rerun of the 2020 election, has hired Chris Kise, a former Florida solicitor general.

Kise advised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during his transition, a role he also filled for former Gov. Rick Scott.

SeDantis is considered a top potential Trump rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

The news of the hire, reported first by NBC, comes, comes as the Justice Department prepares to file a lengthy legal opinion blasting Trump’s push for a ‘special master’ to sort through his claims of executive privilege over 15 boxes of documents he returned from his private Florida club.

The network reported that the newest member of Trump’s legal team has developed a ‘reputation as a skilled political knife fighter.’

The hire comes after US District Judge Eileen Cannon over the weekend signaled her ‘preliminary intent’ to grant Trump’s demand for a special master.

The DOJ was lining up to file a blistering response Tuesday, after filing an unopposed motion Monday night to double the usual length of its response to 40 pages.

It sought the additional length to ‘adequately address the legal and factual issues’ raised by Trump’s team.

That comes as some legal experts tore into the request put forward by Trump’s current legal team in his suit, arguing that there isn’t much president for a third party to sort through a former president’s claim of executive privilege.

The National Archives, in correspondence with Trump’s lawyers, has made clear it believes the privilege resides with the current president, President Biden. 

The government says in a filing that a ‘filter team’ of FBI agents poring over 15 boxes of material seized from Mar-a-Lago has already completed its review of material that may involve attorney client privilege.

Judge Cannon also told the Justice Department to provide a more detailed accounting of what was taken from Mar-a-Lago, which the government said it would do.

The DOJ is conducting an investigation of possible Espionage Act violations. The law governs taking and retention of classified material, after agents took hundreds of pages of classified material that were located at Mar-a-Lago.

There are indications that investigators are also looking at potential obstruction, after government lawyers asked Trump to return documents and then subpoenaed them before agents showed up at Mar-a-Lago while Trump was away.

Trump has repeatedly attacked the search as politically motivated, and his lawyer Jim Trusty on Monday night minimized the retention of documents owned by the government.

He pointed to the request, revealed in correspondence unsealed by another judge, the government made on a June visit to put a better lock on a storage room where documents were being held.

Trusty said there was a ‘chronology of cooperation,’ and told Fox News it showed a president who was ‘accommodating.’ 

‘The advice [DOJ] came up with five days later was, “Hey, put a lock on the door please.” I mean, that’s not the stuff of an urgent nuclear-based espionage type investigation. That’s the stuff of an overdue library book.’

Trump has cycled through a series of lawyers since running for and winning the White House.

Kise has argued and won cases before the U.S. and Florida Supreme Court.