A Florida Judge has appointed Donald Trump’s nominee as special master in the FBI investigation into top secret papers seized by agents from his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Judge Raymond Dearie will now review materials seized during the raid of the former president’s estate in August after Mr Trump successfully demanded one be appointed.
The request was approved by US District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Mr Trump, and Judge Dearie was a candidate that the Justice Department had said earlier this week that it could also accept.
Judge Cannon also rejected the Justice Department’s request for a partial stay in the case and for them to have access to the files.
“The Court does not find it appropriate to accept the Government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expedited and orderly fashion,” the judge stated.
Judge Dearie was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and served as a federal judge in New York since the 1980s. He retired in 2011 and is a senior judge in the circuit.
He also served a seven-year term on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, where he gave the FBI and DoJ permission to run surveillance on Carter Page, who was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
In her 10-page filing, released on Thursday, Judge Cannon urged Dearie to complete his review by 30 November.
Last week she issued a ruling which effectively barred the Department of Justice from using any of the documents seized from Mr Trump’s property to further the criminal investigation into the ex-president until a third-party special master could review the documents and determine whether any are privileged.
The documents, seized by agents at Mr Trump’s Florida estate last month, bore markings indicating classification levels ranging from confidential – the lowest level of classification in the US system – to the highest, top secret.
Some bore additional markings denoting them as containing information pertaining to nuclear weapons or human and signals intelligence sources.
George Conway, a conservative lawyer but public critic of Mr Trump, mocked the judge’s ruling during an appearance on CNN.
“This ruling is absolutely a disgrace. And I don’t think it’s going to take very much to overturn it,” he said.
“(Bill) Barr told The New York Times that the original motion by Donald Trump’s lawyers was a crock of s***, a crock of s***. This opinion is worse than that.
“Because this opinion decides a motion that is focused on just the documents that were marked classified. And the judge claims in this opinion, without any basis, that there are factual and legal disputes about those documents. Well there are no factual disputes about whether a documenbt bears classified markings. That’s ridiculous.”
He added: “There is no dispute that those documents belong to the government of the United States.”
