One of former President Donald Trump’s two suggestions to serve as special master related to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid is a former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge linked to warrants against Carter Page.
Judge Raymond Dearie, a longtime judge for the Eastern District of New York, was among two picks by Trump, alongside two suggestions by the Justice Department, to serve as special master and independently review evidence the bureau had seized from Trump’s Florida resort home.
The choice raised eyebrows because Dearie served as a FISC judge who signed off on the final FISA warrant against Page. The surveillance was eventually ruled to be invalid by the DOJ.
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Page has denied any wrongdoing and was not charged with a crime.
Dearie, despite being suggested by Trump, has been backed by some critics of the former president to be the one chosen in this case.
Andrew Weissmann, a harsh Trump critic and a former top prosecutor on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, urged the DOJ to pick Dearie.
“Going out in a limb here, and taking nothing away from the other judges proposed to be Special Master, but DOJ would be wise to agree to Judge Dearie on the Trump list — and I bet DOJ will. He is a beloved judge in the EDNY — absolute integrity and fairness,” Weissmann tweeted.
“I completely understand people who don’t know Judge Dearie being highly suspicious of anyone who Trump wants. I would be too. But this is actually a Trump team (unsurprising) screw up: having their own Special Master choice rule against them will be fun to watch. Dearie is a model judge.”
In the Page saga, a total of four FISA applications and renewals against the Trump associate were signed off on by FBI and DOJ leadership and approved by the court.
The final FISA warrant against Page was then approved by Dearie on June 29, 2017, enabling 90 more days of surveillance against Page. Neither he nor the other judges who approved the surveillance held a hearing on it.
Dearie was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the bench in 1986 and became a senior judge in 2011. Dearie told Law.com on Aug. 24 that he was moving to inactive status on the bench. This was two days after Trump made his special master filing request to Cannon.
Before becoming a judge, Dearie was chief of the appeals division and chief of the general crimes division for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York in the 1970s, and then worked as a chief assistant U.S. attorney and then as U.S. attorney there from 1980 until he was picked for the judgeship.
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Trump’s other suggestion for special master was Paul Huck Jr., a lawyer who represented the Trump campaign in 2016 and who has worked at Jones Day, in private practice, and as deputy attorney general of Florida.
The DOJ put forth Thomas Griffith, a George W. Bush appointee who served as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2005 to 2020, and Barbara Jones, a retired judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York who was on the bench from 1995 to 2012.
