Federal Judge Accepts Trump's Request for 'Special Master' in Mar-a-Lago Case

Trump's lawyer has argued that the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago are potentially "privileged materials."

According to an FBI affidavit released on Friday, 26 August, 14 of the 15 boxes recovered from former United States President Donald Trump’s Florida estate contained classified documents. 

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

The Mar-a-Lago scandal is heating up with each passing day.

In the latest update, a federal judge, US district court judge Aileen Cannon (appointed by Donald Trump) accepted on 5 September the former president's request to have a "special master" for the review of documents taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from Mar-a-Lago.

A special master is an independent legal expert (like retired lawyer or judge) appointed by the court to act as an arbitrator. In Trump's case, the special master will through the material seized by the FBI to ensure that the rules surrounding executive privilege and attorney-client privilege are not broken by the FBI.

Trump's lawyer has argued that the documents seized are potentially "privileged materials" and the "Department of Justice (DoJ) should not itself decide what it can use in its investigation."

The Case

Just to recap, the FBI, in an unprecedented move, searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence a month ago in Florida with a warrant that gave it permission to look for presidential and classified records the former president allegedly retained, which needless to say, is illegal.

Apart from other things, Trump has called the FBI and the DoJ "vicious monsters, controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media, who tell them what to do." He also sued the US government over the FBI's Mar-a-Lago operation.

Interestingly, former attorney general William Barr, who worked extremely closely with Trump, has defended the FBI's and the DoJ's attempts to investigate the former president. "It seems to me they were driven by concern about highly sensitive information being strewn all over a country club," he told The New York Times in an interview.

(With inputs from Reuters, The Guardian, and the New York Times.)