A federal judge denied the Department of Justice’s motion for a partial stay to allow the use of classified documents obtained during an FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and appointed a special master picked by the former president.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon selected Raymond Dearie to act as special master to review independently documents seized at Trump’s residence last month and look for privileged material, according to an order Thursday.
Dearie, a judge for the Eastern District of New York, was one of the Trump team’s picks for special master and the one the DOJ said it would approve of for the task, along with its own proposed candidates. Cannon gave Dearie a Nov. 30 deadline to complete the review. Dearie is known to be a former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge linked to warrants against onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
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The order states the special master must “provide the Court with a scheduling plan setting forth the procedure and timeline — including the parties’ deadlines — for concluding the review and adjudicating any disputes” within 10 days. The order also states that the Trump team “shall bear 100% of the professional fees and expenses of the Special Master and any professionals, support staff, and expert consultants engaged at the Special Master’s request.”
It was recently reported that the Republican National Committee was not been paying for legal fees surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid despite paying for the former president’s other legal fees since leaving office.
The DOJ had filed a motion for a stay pending an appeal on the Sept. 5 order from Cannon to appoint a special master and temporarily enjoin the DOJ from any further review of any of the roughly 100 documents with classified markings seized from Mar-a-Lago. The motion was denied by Cannon.
“The Court does not find it appropriate to accept the Government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expedited and orderly fashion,” Cannon wrote in the denial of the DOJ’s motion.
The court order is the latest in the legal fight between Trump and the DOJ over documents the former president kept after leaving office. Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document back in June attesting that all classified material was turned over to the government.
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The DOJ is investigating whether violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice occurred as part of their inquiry into the classified documents, according to an unsealed warrant for the August raid. Trump has denied wrongdoing, claiming he declassified the material confiscated.
The department has vowed to appeal an earlier ruling ordering a special master, claiming it could hamper its inquiry, and a declaration in support of that move claimed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence paused its assessment of national security risks in the document stash due to “uncertainty regarding the bounds of the Court’s order and its implications for the activities of the FBI.”
The DOJ has conceded that its in-house “Privilege Review Team” has identified a “limited set” of materials that may have privileged information, such as attorney-client documentation, among the stash of material confiscated in the August raid.
