A Florida judge has appointed candidate Donald Trump as a special master in the FBI’s 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 on the former president’s estate in August after Trump successfully demanded the appointment of one.
The request was approved by US District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Mr Trump, and Judge Dearie was a nominee the Justice Department had said earlier this week it could also accept .
Judge Cannon also rejected the Justice Department’s request for a partial stay of the case and access to the records.
“The Court does not find it appropriate to accept the Government’s findings on these important and controversial issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expeditious and orderly manner,” the judge said.
Judge Dearie was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and served as a federal judge in New York since the 1980s. He retired in 2011 and is a senior circuit judge.
He also served a seven-year term on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, where he gave permission to the FBI and the DoJ to surveil Carter Page, who was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
In her 10-page submission, released Thursday, Judge Cannon urged Dearie to complete her review by Nov. 30.
He issued a ruling last week that effectively barred the Justice Department from using any of the documents seized from Mr. Trump’s estate to continue the criminal investigation into the former president until a third-party special master could review the documents and determine whether ‘there is. privileged
The documents, seized by agents from Trump’s Florida estate last month, were marked with classification levels ranging from confidential, the lowest level of classification in the US system, to the highest and top secret.
Some carried additional markings denoting that they contained information related to nuclear weapons or human intelligence and signals sources.
George Conway, a conservative lawyer but a public critic of Trump, mocked the judge’s decision during an appearance on CNN.
“This sentence is an absolute disgrace. And I don’t think it will take long to overturn it,” he said.
“(Bill) Barr told the New York Times that the original motion from Donald Trump’s lawyers was bullshit, bullshit. This opinion is worse than that.
“Because this opinion decides a motion focused only on the documents that have been marked classified. And the judge states in this opinion, without any basis, that there are factual and legal disputes about these documents. Well, there are no factual disputes as to whether a document has classified marks. This is ridiculous.”
He added: “There is no dispute that these documents belong to the United States government.”