The special master is out, and contempt charges against President Trump’s lawyers are in. Those developments late Thursday spell the start of an escalation in the legal battle against the 45th president. 

Department of Justice lawyers are asking a federal district court judge, Beryl Howell, to hold Mr. Trump’s attorneys in contempt for failing to comply with a grand jury subpoena issued in May that mandated the return of all classified documents in the former president’s possession. The move suggests that the government lacks confidence that all relevant files have been returned. 

Judge Howell is based at the District of Columbia and was involved in the case before it transferred to Florida and the courtrooms of a magistrate judge, Bruce Reinhart, and a district judge, Aileen Cannon. That the ball is now back in Judge Howell’s court suggests that the case could be moving back north.  

That maneuver, reported by the Washington Post, suggests that it is not only Mr. Trump who is in legal jeopardy, but also his lawyers. According to the Post, they have “been unwilling to designate a custodian of records” to “unequivocally assert” that all pertinent records have been returned. 

All of this remains under seal, and so the precise contours of the filing are unknown. A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Stephen Cheung, called it  a “political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen.” He added that Mr. Trump and his counsel “continue to cooperate and be transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal, and unwarranted attacks.” 

The Post reports that “some of Mr. Trump’s lawyers are wary of making any claim under oath based on Mr. Trump’s word alone,” which would complicate the appointment of a custodian to do just that. In June, one lawyer, Christina Bobb, inked an attestation that a diligent search had been conducted.

That turned out to be inaccurate, as the execution of a subsequently issued search warrant disclosed more than 100 more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. In recent days, two more classified records have been unearthed by Mr. Trump’s team at a storage facility at West Palm Beach after four separate premises were searched.     

A finding of contempt is usually accompanied by a daily fine, the amount of which is set by the presiding judge. Of greater consequence for Mr. Trump was a brief missive from the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which confirmed the closing of the special counsel’s chapter of the case. 

That filing, which confirmed the riders’ earlier decision, indicates that Mr. Trump’s team has chosen not to challenge — to the entire 11th Circuit —  the appellate panel’s rejection of Judge Cannon’s appointment of Judge Raymond Dearie to superintend the case. 

That effectively ends Judge Cannon’s role in the litigation, but it could mark an acceleration in the DOJ’s seemingly inexorable march toward criminal charges. The government, led by special counsel John “Jack” Smith, is now unfettered by external constraints on its ability to comb through the thousands of documents it seized at Mar-a-Lago.