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- The DOJ has agreed to one of Trump's nominees for special master in their probe of misplaced WH docs.
- The DOJ said that a former NY District Judge appointed by Reagan was fit to play the role.
- Trump's other choice was rejected by DOJ lawyers, who said he lacked experience.
The Department of Justice has signed off on one of former President Donald Trump's candidates to serve as special master and sift through the thousands of White House documents Trump stored at Mar-a-Lago.
The DOJ said in court filings that it would allow Raymond Dearie, 78, former Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, to act as special master, according to Reuters.
While Trump's team has rejected all of the DOJ's picks, the department's approval of Dearie marks a rare mutual agreement in the ongoing legal battle.
On on Wednesday, Florida judge Aileen Cannon appointed Dearie as the special master, and denied the DOJ's request for at least 100 classified documents to be turned directly over to investigators instead of the special master, dealing an early blow to federal prosecutors in their probe, according to court filings.
Dearie will have until November 30 to review the trove of over 11,000 documents, Aileen wrote in her ruling.
Dearie, 78, was nominated by Ronald Reagan and served in the US District court from 1986 to 2011. In 2012, he was appointed by Supreme Court Justice John Roberts to a 7-year term on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where he oversaw requests by federal investigators for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States.
In his role as a judge in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Dearie was one of five Republican-appointed judges who signed off on FISA warrants to surveil a former Trump advisor, Carter Page, to investigate his ties to the Russian government. Two of the four approved warrants were later declared invalid after the Inspector General found a series of misstatements and omissions in the applications by the FBI to get the court warrants to eavesdrop on Page.
Last Thursday, the Department of Justice appealed a federal judge's decision to appoint a special master to review specific classified files among the over 11,000 documents that Trump took with him from the White House. Trump's case and the move to appoint a special master opened an unprecedented Pandora's box of concerns for national security experts.
By the end of last week, the parties had submitted their list of proposed candidates, which included three former judges and Paul Huck Jr., former counsel to the Governor of Florida. The DOJ said that it did not believe Huck had the experience necessary.
In earlier filings, Trump's team asked a judge to deny the DOJ's request for them to have access to classified records.
If a special master is indeed chosen, he or she would likely need to have the highest national security clearance level in the US. Ultimately, judges appoint special masters based on their expertise, so in this case, the special master would have to be deeply embedded in the national security realm, experts told Insider.
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/HZN876I
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