The 11,000 government-owned documents which President Donald Trump hoarded at his Palm Beach property amount to more than 200,000 pages of records, according to a new court filing by his legal team.
Mr Trump’s lawyers made the revelation in a letter to Judge Raymond Dearie, the New York-based jurist who has been named a special master to review the documents by Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed Florida judge who previously ordered the Department of Justice to cease using any of the records seized in the 8 August search of Mr Trump’s property to further its criminal probe into the ex-president.
Though the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Judge Cannon to allow the Department of Justice to use approximately 100 highly classified documents in its ongoing probe, Judge Dearie is still charged with reviewing the remaining records to determine whether any can be shielded from the department under attorney-client or executive privilege.
In the filing, which contains Mr Trump’s objections to an accelerated review schedule laid out by Judge Dearie, Mr Trump’s lawyers argue that an early October deadline for scanning and reviewing the documents is unrealistic because vendors cannot process the documents quickly enough.
“The problem is compounded by the fact that when Plaintiff’s counsel referred to either 11,000 pages or even 11,000 documents during the status conference (we are still awaiting the transcript), the government chose not to interject with an accurate number. In conversations between Plaintiff’s counsel and the government regarding a data vendor, the government mentioned that the 11,000 documents contain closer to 200,000 pages,” they wrote.
Mr Trump’s lawyers also argued that a mid-October deadline for processing the documents would be more acceptable.
The selection of a document handling vendor has been made more difficult by the fact that Judge Dearie has ordered Mr Trump’s side to pay for the entire process, and not all of the vendors that could meet the needs of the complex case have been willing to submit bids on the project.
