BREAKING: Florida judge gives win to Trump and appoints special master to handle documents taken from Mar-a-Lago, dismissing Department of Justice request to start reviewing classified files
A Florida judge on Thursday dismissed a Justice Department appeal, blocking it from resuming its review of classified records seized by the FBI from Donald Trump‘s Florida estate.
Instead federal judge Aileen Cannon sided with the former president by appointing Senior District Judge Raymond Dearie as a ‘special master’ to review records seized by the FBI.
Trump’s lawyers last month asked that a third party be put in charge of reviewing the documents to weed out any that were protected by executive privilege or attorney-client privilege.
The Justice Department said that was unnecessary, but when the court said it would appoint a ‘special master’ it said it would accept Dearie, the former chief judge of the federal court based in Brooklyn, in the role.
However, it lodged an appeal asking that 100 documents marked ‘classified’ be exempted from the review.
It argued that if the documents were classified then it was nonsensical to suggest the government had no right to see them.
Raymond J. Dearie, the former top federal judge in the Eastern District of New York, was proposed by the Trump team as an overseer of the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation: on Monday the Justice Department said they approved of his candidate
‘Plaintiff does not and could not assert that he owns or has any possessory interest in classified records; that he has any right to have those government records returned to him; or that he can advance any plausible claims of attorney-client privilege as to such records that would bar the government from reviewing or using them,’ it said in its appeal.
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