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.