The Justice Department and lawyers for former President Donald Trump will meet Tuesday afternoon with the newly appointed special master conducting an independent review of the evidence the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago.
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The special master, Judge Raymond Dearie, ordered Trump’s team and DOJ prosecutors to meet at his Brooklyn federal courtroom at 2 p.m. on Tuesday for a preliminary conference to hash things out. Ahead of the meeting, there are a number of significant lingering disagreements between the two sides.
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In a filing late Monday evening, Trump’s team told the special master it is hesitant to provide specifics on what may have been declassified because the issue may be a defense against future criminal charges.
Trump’s lawyers wrote that if they were forced to disclose this specific declassification evidence, then “the Special Master process will have forced the Plaintiff to fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident in the District Court’s order.”
Judge Aileen Cannon appointed Dearie as special master after he was suggested for the gig by Trump and was deemed acceptable by the Justice Department.
Cannon declined to accept the DOJ’s claims that the 100 records with classification markings on them seized by the FBI are, in fact, classified government documents, and she said Dearie should look into that independently and make it a priority for his review.
DOJ lawyers told Dearie on Monday that they had applied for a stay to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“If the Eleventh Circuit stays Judge Cannon’s order with respect to documents with classification markings, then the Special Master will not review the documents with classification markings,” the Justice Department wrote. “If the Eleventh Circuit does not stay the review of the documents with classification markings, the government will propose a way forward.”
The Justice Department also proposed a third-party vendor be hired to scan, host, and provide access to the seized Mar-a-Lago records in its own Monday filing, noting that FBI agents could be there to observe the process and maintain the chain of custody. DOJ lawyers suggested that 500 documents could be processed and logged by the special master each day.
The Justice Department also said it “strongly urges” Dearie to consult with the National Archives and Records Administration when making his determinations, adding that it could facilitate that process. The DOJ has said its criminal investigation into Trump began with a referral from the National Archives earlier this year.
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Cannon said earlier this month that she was temporarily blocking the Justice Department from reviewing and using the seized Mar-a-Lago records for investigative purposes pending the completion of a special master review, although she stressed that her ruling should not be taken to mean she was in any way impeding the intelligence assessment and classification review being conducted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other spy community elements.
The Justice Department has pushed back on that, claiming that pausing the FBI’s criminal investigation while separately continuing the intelligence community’s damage assessment is basically impossible.
