A special master was selected Thursday to review the records confiscated during the FBI’s raid of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence.
Brooklyn-based federal judge Raymond Dearie was tapped after Judge Aileen Cannon of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida granted Trump’s petition for an independent court-chosen arbiter to sift through the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. Dearie accepted the responsibility in a signed court declaration.
In her order, Cannon directed Dearie “to prioritize review of the approximately 100 documents marked as classified (and papers physically attached thereto).” Cannon also rejected the Justice Department’s request for permission to restart its criminal probe into the retrieved contents. The DOJ had appealed Cannon’s last ruling allowing the appointment of the special master and pausing the use of the seized materials for the investigation.
Prosecutors are probing crimes including violations of the Espionage Act, illegal handling of government records, and obstruction of justice. The DOJ argued that Cannon’s injunction against examining the documents would impede the intelligence community’s national-security risk assessment.
“The injunction against using classified records in the criminal investigation could impede efforts to identify the existence of any additional classified records that are not being properly stored — which itself presents the potential for ongoing risk to national security,” the DOJ wrote in its appeal.
If the government pushes further, the dispute could escalate to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and eventually the Supreme Court.
Dearie must complete the review of the potentially privileged documents by November 30, after the midterm elections, when the GOP is expected to recover control of at least one chamber of Congress.
In his motion for a special master filed in late August, Trump argued that a third-party screening of the documents is necessary because the sudden search of his home so close to midterms “involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump.”
Cannon said she allowed the special master because of considerations for the “undeniably unprecedented nature of the search of a former president’s residence” and for the fact that a special-master review may be Trump’s only legal recourse while he claims the government took his property. However, in her Thursday filing, Cannon said Trump must incur the cost of the special master’s inspection.
“As a function of Plaintiff’s former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own,” Cannon said. “A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.”