WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 tasked with reviewing 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 major long-term effects on the criminal investigation or knock it significantly off course, it will almost certainly delay it 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.