Former president’s lawyers argue against excluding material marked as classified from review, as the government had proposed
WASHINGTON—The Justice Department said it would accept one of the Trump team’s proposed candidates to serve as a third-party arbiter to review documents the FBI seized from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home last month.
Raymond J. Dearie, a former chief federal judge in New York, has the qualifications to do the job of special master, prosecutors wrote in a court filing late Monday, as do the two candidates they had proposed, retired federal judges Barbara S. Jones and Thomas B. Griffith.
“Judges Jones, Griffith, and Dearie each have substantial judicial experience, during which they have presided over federal criminal and civil cases, including federal cases involving national security and privilege concerns,” the Justice Department wrote in its filing, asking that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon choose the one best positioned to quickly finish the work. It isn’t clear when she will do so.
The rare point of agreement came after Mr. Trump’s lawyers earlier on Monday pressed Judge Cannon to allow an independent attorney to review all of the documents the FBI seized in its search of Mar-a-Lago, including those marked classified, saying they didn’t trust the Justice Department to accurately represent what was in them.
“The Government has not proven these records remain classified. That issue is to be determined later,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote in a Monday morning filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who last week ordered the appointment of a special master in the matter.
They disputed the status of around 100 documents marked as classified, which the Justice Department had signaled were central to a criminal investigation, providing their most specific arguments yet to counter prosecutors’ request to continue evaluating the documents for national-security concerns.
“In opposing any neutral review of the seized materials, the Government seeks to block a reasonable first step toward restoring order from chaos and increasing public confidence in the integrity of the process,” the Trump legal team said, adding that the issue “at its core is a document storage dispute.’’
In a separate filing Monday afternoon, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said they oppose the two Justice Department candidates for the special master role, and asked to explain their reasoning privately before the court to be “more respectful to the candidates.” The filing said only that they believe “there are specific reasons why those nominees are not preferred for service as Special Master in this case.”
Mr. Dearie is a former chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York who also served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He was also among the FISA judges who signed an order permitting electronic surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump foreign-policy aide, as part of the FBI’s investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign had ties with Russia.