The first hearing overseen by a senior federal judge tasked with reviewing government-owned documents retrieved from Donald Trump’s home was marred with technical difficulties as those dialling in remotely failed to mute their phones.
Staff of the Brooklyn federal court scrambled to contain the chaos at the inaugural hearing held by special master Raymond Dearie, as lines flooded with music and background noises.
“God Bless America,” a person could be heard singing, reported Bloomberg.
“Mute! Mute! Mute!” one person yelled. “You need to mute your phones,” screamed another. Some vulgar language was used to put across the point as well, reported the news wire agency.
According to the US attorney’s office, the staff was “working on the noise issue” for the dial-in.
Once the hearing began, Judge Dearie appeared sceptical after Mr Trump’s lawyers resisted his request for more information about whether the seized records had been previously declassified – as Trump has maintained.
His lawyers have consistently stopped short of that claim even as they asserted in a separate filing on Tuesday that the Justice Department had not proven the documents were classified.
“In the case of someone who has been president of the United States, they have unfettered access along with unfettered declassification authority," submitted Mr Trump’s lawyer James Trusty in court.
But the judge rebutted this claim by saying he would be inclined to treat a document as classified if the lawyers did not advance a claim of declassification and the Justice Department made an acceptable case that such records had remained classified.
“The government gives me prima facie evidence that these are classified documents — as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of it,” he said.
Mr Trump’s attorneys had previously signalled their intent to resist offering any claims of declassification in a letter to the judge on Sunday.
The Trump team said doing so would force Mr Trump to “fully and specifically disclose a defence to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident in the District Court’s order”.
The judge did not appear impressed. “You can’t have your cake and eat it,” he said.
Additional reporting from the wires
