Roughly 200,000 pages of documents were confiscated from Mar-a-Lago during the hunt for classified material, lawyers for former President Donald Trump divulged in a court filing.
The revelation came in a letter from Trump lawyers to the special master examining the document stash. Trump’s lawyers dissented to an “overly optimistic and aggressive” timeline for a review of documents, citing the sheer number of documents as a reason to allocate more time to the process.
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“Plaintiff respectfully suggests that Your Honor and the parties will be best served by having the retained vendor convey a supportable timeframe for scanning roughly 200,000 pages into a platform,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “It would be better to base deadlines on actual data and not wistful claims by the Government.”
Trump’s team noted that they have struggled to find a vendor that can scan the roughly 11,000 documents — which total some 200,000 pages of material — and upload them to a system for the parties involved to review.
Explaining that the “rough rule of thumb” for reviewing documents is that one can read about 50 pages per hour, they also cast doubt on the more ambitious timeline sought by the government.
“The overall position of the Government continues to be overly optimistic and aggressive in terms of the timing of productions and Plaintiff’s review, which is why Plaintiff respectfully renews his position that mid-October is a realistic final production deadline,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
U.S. District Senior Judge Raymond Dearie is the special master, a third-party reviewer tasked with examining the stash of documents from Mar-a-Lago and weeding out privileged material.
Trump’s legal team won the appointment of a special master after a court battle with the Justice Department. In the time since his appointment, however, some legal experts have openly pondered whether the move backfired, as Dearie has pressed the Trump team over claims he declassified documents and has sided with DOJ prosecutors in several instances.
Another objection by Trump’s legal team to the document review process was Dearie’s request that they verify the government’s list of material seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Roughly 100 documents confiscated from Mar-a-Lago during the Aug. 8 search and seizure bore classified markings, according to court documents. Material collected ranged from “CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET information,” according to an affidavit for the raid.
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The DOJ is investigating possible violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice. But Trump has vehemently denied wrongdoing, publicly declaring that a president can declassify material “even by thinking about it.” Notably, his legal team previously conceded that “it would be appropriate for the special master to possess a Top Secret/SCI security clearance” to review the documents.
Dearie, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, was one of two individuals Trump’s legal team suggested as a special master. The FBI has conceded that its in-house “Privilege Review Team” has found a “limited set” of materials, which may include privileged material, in the trove of documents from Mar-a-Lago.
