Pages from the court files of former President Donald Trump’s attorneys were taken on Monday, September 12, 2022.
Jon Elswick / AP
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Jon Elswick / AP
Pages from the court files of former President Donald Trump’s attorneys were taken on Monday, September 12, 2022.
Jon Elswick / AP
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department said on Monday that it is willing to accept one of Donald Trump’s options for an independent arbitrator to review seized documents in a FBI search of the former president’s home in Florida last month.
Accommodation can help speed up the selection process and shorten any delays caused by the appointment of a so-called special master. The judge in the case, accepting a request from the Trump team, said last week that she would appoint a neutral arbitrator to review the record and remove anything that might be covered by executive privilege. or attorney-client privilege.
Department attorneys said in a filing Monday night that, in addition to the two retired judges they previously featured, they would also be pleased with one of the Trump team’s picks – Raymond Dearie, former chief justice of the federal court in the Eastern District of New York . He is currently in a senior active status and the department said he has indicated he is willing and “able to do the job quickly” if appointed.
It was not immediately clear whether US judge Aileen Cannon would name Dearie or anyone else. Trump’s team earlier said Monday that it opposes both options by the Justice Department.
The owner’s back and forth especially came as Trump’s lawyer in a 21-page profile on Monday dismissed the former president’s keeping of top secret documents at Mar-a-Lago as a “storage dispute” and called on Cannon to uphold a directive temporarily halting key aspects of the criminal investigation. offenses of the Ministry of Justice. Trump’s team called the seized documents ‘purportedly classified files’, saying the Justice Department had failed to prove that the documents obtained by the FBI during the August 8 search were classified. or still so to this day.
The filing highlights important factual and legal disagreements between attorneys for Trump and the US government as the Justice Department intends to launch a criminal investigation into the retention of defense information in Mar. -a-Lago. Department lawyers in their own filing rejected the idea that the documents, many of which are classified as top secret, belonging to Trump or Mar-a-Lago are authorized to be stored. they.
“The investigation into the 45th President of the United States is unprecedented and flawed,” they wrote. “At its core, the document retention dispute has gotten out of hand, the Government seeks to criminalize the 45th President’s possession of his personal and presidential records. wrong way.”
The investigation hit a roadblock last week when Cannon accepted the Trump team’s request for a special master’s and barred the department from, for now, examining documents for investigative purposes.
The Justice Department asked the judge to lift that hold and said it would challenge her ruling in a federal appeals court. The department said its investigation risks irreparable harm if the order is upheld, noting that confusion over its scope has prompted the intelligence community to pause the risk assessment. individual.
But Trump’s lawyers said in their own petition Monday that Cannon should not allow the FBI to continue to review the classified records. It said the government had unilaterally identified the records as classified but had yet to prove that they still were.
In opposition to any neutral assessment of seized documents, the Government seeks to prevent a reasonable first step towards restoring order from chaos and strengthening public confidence, the lawyers wrote. them into process integrity”.
Both parties on Friday night proposed different names of candidates who could serve as a particular employer, although they disagreed on the scope of duties that person should have. Cannon said the unnamed arbitrator would be tasked with reviewing the documents and segregation of any documents that might be mentioned in requests for executive privilege or attorney-client privilege.
The Justice Department recommends either Barbara Jones, a retired Manhattan judge who served as a special expert in previous high-profile investigations, or Thomas Griffith, a retired federal appeals court attorney. retired from the District of Columbia, who was appointed to the bench by the former President. Mr. George W. Bush. The department said in its proposal that the captain in particular should not have access to classified documents, or be empowered to review requests for operating privileges.
On Monday, Trump’s team told the judge it opposes both of those candidates but is not prepared to say why publicly at this time.
Trump’s lawyers proposed either Dearie, a senior status judge in federal court in Brooklyn who also previously served on the Court of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or attorney Paul Huck Jr. documented and must be able to evaluate executive privilege requests.
The Justice Department said it was willing to support Dearie’s selection but opposed the selection of Huck because of what it said was a lack of relevant experience.
In Monday’s presidential filings, the Trump team once again expressed broad views on presidential power, asserting that a president has “unregulated access” to his presidential records. and the absolute right to declassify any information without “approval of the bureaucratic elements of the executive branch” – although it does not say, as Trump maintains, that he has actually decipher them.
The Justice Department said Trump has no right to keep presidential documents. And the criminal statutes the department has used as the basis for its investigation, including the criminalization of willful retention of national defense information, do not require classification of records.
In any event, the Justice Department said more than 100 documents with the classified mark were found in the search last month.
Trump, who often spends time at his various properties, was at his Virginia golf club on Monday
