On Thursday, a federal judge appointed a New York legal expert as an independent arbiter in the criminal investigation into the presence of confidential documents in former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, refusing to allow the Justice Department to resume the use of highly sensitive information. sensitive from documents seized in an FBI search last month.
District Judge Aileen Cannon authorized newly appointed special arbitrator Raymond Dearie to review the entire tranche of documents collected in the Mar-a-Lago research on August 8 and set a November deadline for his work. In the meantime, she continued to prevent the department from using about 100 seized documents marked classified for her investigations.
It is almost certain that the order delivered by the Trump-nominated cannon will slow the pace of the investigation and set the stage for a challenge in a federal appeals court.
The department had granted Cannon until Thursday to suspend his order to suspend the review of confidential documents by investigators while the special master completed his work. The department said it would ask the US Court of Appeals in Atlanta for the 11th Circuit’s intervention if it hadn’t done so by then.
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The Justice Department did not make immediate comments on Thursday’s ruling.
Cannon, who last week agreed to Trump’s team’s request for a special referee over the Justice Department’s objections, made it clear on Thursday in her order that she was unwilling to blindly accept Trump’s characterizations of the government’s documents, stating that “The impartial procedure does not require unquestionable trust in the decisions of the Department of Justice”.
She rejected the department’s position that Trump could have no proprietary interest in the documents and said she was open to the possibility that the former president could make valid claims of privilege on at least some of the documents. You stressed the ongoing disagreements between the two parties on the “correct designation of the seized materials” and on the “legal implications that arise from such designations”.
“The Court does not see fit to accept the government’s conclusions on these important and controversial issues without further review by a neutral third party in a swift and orderly manner,” he wrote.
[Con información de The Associated Press]
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