Court-appointed special master Judge Raymond Dearie expressed his dissatisfaction on Tuesday with the scant information the Justice Department and former President Donald Trump‘s defense attorneys are providing him over disagreements over documents taken from Mar-a-Lago.
During a half-hour conference call with the lawyers from both sides, Judge Dearie, who was serving as the third-party reviewer of the seized documents, said, “Where’s the beef? I need some beef.”
The conversation brought up how dealing with privacy claims in the historic criminal probe into Trump could be difficult and drawn out. The former President claims that at least some of the documents are his and that the Justice Department’s investigators shouldn’t be able to utilise them.
Dearie is reviewing the papers to see which ones the Justice Department can leverage in its judicial inquiry. After that, he will communicate his suggestions to Florida district judge Aileen Cannon.
In the collection of documents collected from Trump’s Florida residence, Dearie cited, for example, a letter that is already in dispute as potentially private. The copy that was discovered in Mar-a-Lago was not signed, but the letter appeared to be addressed to the Justice Department. If the agency had gotten it, the Justice Department remained mum.
Dearie questioned why the judge couldn’t decide if the letter should be kept confidential if the two parties couldn’t agree on whether it had been sent.
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“I don’t want to be dealing with nonsense objections, nonsense assertions, especially when I have one month to deal with who knows how many assertions,” Dearie said.
A deadline for him to decide on the privacy of papers by the middle of December was established by Dearie’s conversation on Tuesday and earlier orders.
Approximately 100 classified documents that were taken from Dearie’s work at Mar-a-Lago and are currently being examined independently by the Justice Department are also being challenged by the department in a federal appeals court.
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Dearie informed the parties that he also hoped to hear from both sides regarding how he should handle documents that Trump wants to claim as personal in order to potentially shield them from investigators, as well as documents that he also wants to claim are protected by executive privilege in order to potentially turn them into government documents.
“Unless I’m wrong, and I’ve been wrong before, there’s a certain incongruity there. Perhaps the plaintiffs’ counsel will address that in a submission,” Dearie added.
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By November 12, both parties will present Dearie with a significant portion of their supplementary document privilege claims.
The number of the almost 22,000 pages that were taken at Mar-a-Lago Trump that are under dispute and will require the special master to rule has not yet been disclosed by the parties.
