A federal judge on Monday formally dismissed former President Donald Trump’s lawsuit that had resulted in an independent review of documents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Judge Aileen Cannon tossed the lawsuit for lack of jurisdiction after being ordered to do so by an appeals court. The special master review delayed the Justice Department’s investigation by months because prosecutors were barred from using the files in their probe.

On Dec. 1, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta unanimously ruled to end the review by a so-called “special master.”  The court — comprised of three Republican appointees, two by Trump — rejected each argument by Trump and his attorneys for why a special master was necessary, including his claims that various seized records were protected by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.

“It is indeed extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president — but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or otherwise gives the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation,” the judges wrote.

The judges suggested Trump had no legal basis to challenge the search in the first place.

“The law is clear,” the judges wrote. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”

The court gave Trump a week to challenge the decision before it took effect. The former president’s lawyers let a Thursday deadline pass without appealing to the Supreme Court.

A Trump spokesperson said shortly after the Dec. 1 decision that the ruling was “purely procedural” and did not address the “impropriety” of the raid, and promised that the ex-president would “continue to fight” against the Justice Department. 

The special master litigation has played out alongside an ongoing investigation examining the potential criminal mishandling of national defense information as well as efforts to possibly obstruct the documents probe. Attorney General Merrick Garland last month appointed Jack Smith, a veteran public corruption prosecutor, to serve as special counsel overseeing that investigation.

The conflict over the special master began just weeks after the FBI’s search, when Trump sued in federal court in Florida seeking the appointment of an independent arbiter to review the roughly 13,000 documents the Justice Department says were taken from the home.

Cannon granted the Trump team’s request, naming veteran Brooklyn judge Raymond Dearie to serve as special master and tasking him with reviewing the seized records and filtering out from the criminal investigation any documents that might be covered by claims of executive privilege or attorney-client privilege. Drearie expected to complete his review Friday.

The Justice Department objected to the appointment, saying it was an unnecessary hindrance to its criminal investigation and that Trump had no credible basis to invoke either attorney-client privilege or executive privilege to shield the records from investigators.

It sought, as a first step, to regain access to the classified documents. A federal appeals panel sided with prosecutors in September, permitting the Justice Department to resume its review of the documents with classification markings. Two of the judges on that panel — Andrew Brasher and Britt Grant, both Trump appointees — were part of Thursday's ruling as well.

The department also pressed for unfettered access to the much larger trove of unclassified documents, saying such records could contain important evidence for their investigation.