Trump and Justice Department submit special master nominees to review Mar-a-Lago

CNN
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The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump’s lawyers have submitted their respective nominees to serve as the special master reviewing materials seized from Mar-a-Lago and vastly different proposals for how the process should work.

Friday night’s joint court filing also stressed the wide gap between the DOJ and Trump, as the two sides disagreed over how long the special master investigation would last, what he or she would consider, and who foots the bill.

It’s the latest legal turn in the Justice Department’s historic criminal investigation into Trump’s potential mishandling of documents as his term ended in January 2021. The FBI executed a search warrant last month at the former president’s Florida home and resort, seizing 11,000 documents, including more than 100 classified government records.

US District Judge Aileen Cannon earlier this week granted Trump’s request for a special master – a third-party attorney outside of the government – and ordered criminal investigators at the Justice Department to stop using the seized materials as part of their ongoing probe until the special master finishes their review.

It will be up to Cannon to sort out the differences.

The Justice Department wants the special master to move relatively quickly, wrapping up its review in five weeks, by October 17. Trump proposed 90 days.

The Justice Department also argued that the special master shouldn’t touch any documents with classification markings and that the review shouldn’t include any executive privilege considerations. Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, want the special master to review “all seized materials,” including classified records.

Whomever ends up getting appointed to fill the role will immediately be catapulted into the center of one of the most consequential criminal investigations in modern American history.

The Justice Department nominated two retired federal judges – Thomas Griffith and Barbara Jones – to serve as special master.

Griffith, a Bush appointee, served on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals from 2005 to 2020. In one of his final major rulings before retiring, he wrote the majority opinion rejecting House Democrats’ attempt to subpoena Trump’s former White House Counsel Don McGahn. (The decision was later overturned.)

Griffith later co-authored a report alongside other prominent conservative lawyers and officials debunking Trump’s lies about massive fraud in the 2020 election. And he publicly endorsed President Joe Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court.

Jones, a Bill Clinton appointee to the federal bench, is a former federal prosecutor and a retired judge from the Southern District of New York from 1995 to 2012.

She was tapped to serve as a special master to examine materials seized during an FBI raid of Rudy Giuliani’s home and office in April 2021. She was also a special master in the Michael…