The Justice Department and Donald Trump's legal team are to stake out positions Friday on the precise role to be played by an independent arbiter who will review documents seized during an FBI search of the former president's Florida home.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon had given both sides until Friday to submit potential candidates for the role of a “special master,” as well as proposals for the scope of the person’s duties and the schedule for his or her work.
The back-and-forth over the special master is playing out amid an FBI investigation into the retention of several hundred classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago within the past year. Though the legal wrangling is unlikely to have long-term effects on the investigation, it will almost certainly delay the criminal probe and has already caused the intelligence community to temporarily pause a national risk assessment it was doing.
Over the strenuous objections of the Justice Department, Cannon on Monday granted the Trump team's request for the special master and directed the department to temporarily halt its review of records for investigative purposes.
She said the person would be responsible for sifting through the records recovered during the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago and filter out from the criminal investigation any documents potentially covered by claims of attorney-client or executive privilege.
Roughly 11,000 documents — including more than 100 with classified markings, some at the top-secret level — were recovered during the search. That's on top of classified documents contained in 15 boxes retrieved in January by the National Archives and Records Administration, and additional secret records the department took back during a June visit to Mar-a-Lago.
The Justice Department had objected to the Trump team’s request for a special master, saying it had already done its own review and identified a limited subset of records that possibly involve attorney-client privilege. It said that executive privilege does not apply in this investigation because Trump, no longer president, had no right to claim the documents as his.
The department on Thursday filed a notice of appeal indicating it would contest the judge’s order to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Officials asked the judge to lift her hold on their investigative work pending their appeal, as well as her requirement that the department share with a special master the classified records that were recovered.
It is not clear whether Trump or anyone else will be charged.
