Judge grants Trump’s motion to appoint special master in Mar-a-Lago FBI raid
September 5, 2022
A federal judge on Monday granted former President Donald Trump’s request to appoint a special master to review the trove of documents seized during the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago last month.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is a win for Trump and his legal team and came despite objections from the Justice Department, which argued it had already completed a review of potentially privileged documents.
In her ruling, Cannon agreed to appoint the special master – an independent third party – to review the boxloads of personal items, documents and material seized in the FBI’s Aug. 8 raid that may potentially subject to claims of attorney-client or executive privilege.
“In addition to being deprived of potentially significant personal documents, which alone creates a real harm, plaintiff faces an unquantifiable potential harm by way of improper disclosure of sensitive information to the public,” Cannon wrote in her ruling.
Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in 2020, ordered the DOJ to stop reviewing and using the seized materials as part of its criminal investigation until the special master can complete a review.
She will, however, allow US intelligence officials to continue a classification review and national security risk assessment.
The judge gave Trump’s lawyers and the DOJ until Friday to file a proposed list of special master candidates.
Cannon had previously signaled her inclination to authorize the request, asking a DOJ lawyer during arguments last week, “Ultimately, what is the harm of appointing a special master?”
The Justice Department had argued the appointment would slow the pace of its probe into the presence of top-secret information at Mar-a-Lago and that its filter team had already completed its work.
Federal prosecutors also said Trump couldn’t claim executive privilege because the seized records belonged to the government – and not him.
“He is no longer the president,” Jay Bratt, the department’s top counterintelligence lawyer, said at a Sept. 1 hearing. “And because he is no longer president, he did not have a right to take those documents.”
But Trump’s team of lawyers said their push to have a special master appointed was not akin to a national security scandal, saying it was an “overdue library book scenario.”
His lawyers accused a “politicized” DOJ of trying to thwart their efforts to have the special master installed so that federal investigators could just go “unchecked, unobserved, unmonitored.”
The latest decision came after Cannon approved the unsealing of a more detailed inventory list of the items seized during the Aug. 8 search of Trump’s home, which included a number of classified documents and dozens of folders marked “classified” that were empty.
The rundown of documents also showed the federal agents took innocuous items, including the former president’s clothing magazine and newspaper clippings that he kept.
In total, 11,179 government documents and photographs seized by the FBI bore no classification markings at all. By contrast, 54 documents were marked “SECRET” and another 18 were called “TOP SECRET.”
During a rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump slammed the Justice Department and FBI as “vicious monsters.”
“The shameful raid and break-in of my home at Mar-a-Lago was a travesty of justice that made a mockery of America’s laws, traditions and principals before the entire world,” Trump told supporters during a nearly two-hour speech.
“The FBI and the Justice Department have become vicious monsters controlled by radical leftist scoundrels, lawyers and the media who tell them what to do — you people right there — and when to do it,” he continued, while pointing to a media box.
Sauce: https://nypost.com/2022/09/05/judge-grants-trumps-motion-to-appoint-special-master-in-mar-a-lago-fbi-raid/
pdf: Filing (scribd, download)