Special master Judge Raymond Dearie voiced frustration over the lack of information he has received from former President Donald Trump‘s legal team during a conference call Tuesday.
Dearie, who is the third-party lawyer appointed to filter out any privileged material from the Mar-a-Lago raid stash, argued an initial log the Trump team provided him was slim on details, making it difficult for him to adjudicate whether he should shield the material in question from the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump’s handling of documents.
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“It’s a little perplexing as I go through the log,” Dearie explained during the call, the New York Times reported. “What’s the expression — ‘Where’s the beef?’ I need some beef.”
The Tuesday call with lawyers from both sides largely centered around a subset of documents that the DOJ separated from the main batch by the department’s in-house filter team, according to the report. The call could preview additional points of friction between Dearie and Trump’s team when they move on to the rest of the document trove.
Dearie said Trump’s team should give the names of lawyers connected to material they deem protected via attorney-client privilege, per the report. At one point, he also criticized both sides for failing to resolve minor disputes among themselves.
He cited an example of a letter that had been found at Mar-a-Lago addressed to the DOJ, but the agency declined to say whether there was such a receipt.
“I don’t want to be dealing with nonsense objections, nonsense assertions, especially when I have one month to deal with who knows how many assertions,” Dearie said, per CNN.
Another example he raised was a document about Trump’s personal property, which Trump’s team insisted was protected by executive privilege — an assertion usually reserved for presidential material.
“Unless I’m wrong, and I’ve been wrong before, there’s certainly an incongruity there,” Judge Dearie quipped, per CNN.
Dearie was appointed to the post by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who approved the former president’s request for a special master to evaluate the document trove. The DOJ is appealing that decision. A prior court order set a mid-December deadline for him to make decisions on the documents.
Both sides are reportedly expected to make most of their privilege claims by the middle of next month.
The two sides have clashed on several occasions since the special master’s appointment. Dearie’s review remains ongoing while the legal challenges against the special master appointment play out in court.
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During the Aug. 8 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, government officials snagged about 200,000 pages worth of documents, including about 100 documents that bore classified markings ranging from “CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET information,” according to court documents.
The government is investigating possible violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, per court documents, but Trump has adamantly denied wrongdoing. He has argued that he declassified the documents in Mar-a-Lago and surmised that a president can declassify material “even by thinking about it.”
The Supreme Court has declined to take up his plea to intervene in the document debacle.
