Judge Raymond Dearie, a special master appointed by the court, is unhappy at the slow progress on the disputes over documents that were seized by the Justice Department from Mar-a-Lago, the personal residence of former president Donald Trump. He has expressed his frustrations on the slowness exhibited by both the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the lawyers defending Trump.
On Tuesday, Justice Dearie, who is acting as the reviewer of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, said, “Where’s the beef? I need some beef.” He was on a 30 minute conference call with attorneys representing both the sides.
The discussion makes it clear that both sides have been slow and the process of contesting that some of the documents that Trump claims are his personal ones will prove to be a messy process. Trump does not want to allow some documents to be used by the Justice Department in its investigations. However, the process of determining what is personal and what is official is proving to be difficult.
Almost 22,000 pages were seized from Mar-a-Lago. Neither of the two parties: the Department of Justice (DoJ) nor Trump have indicated which of these pages are in dispute so that the special master can make a call on them. He has to review the disputed documents and send his recommendations to Judge Aileen Cannon, the district judge, in Florida.
The Justice Department had challenged the process of appointing a special master at a federal appeals court. It is already working on 100 records that were seized from Trump’s residence as they were marked as classified. So, these records were split from the ones that can be reviewed by Dearie, who is a judge from the Eastern District of New York.
There has not been much progress from the defense side as well, as the attorneys who represent Donald Trump have not responded with sufficient speed making Dearie say, “I don’t want to be dealing with nonsense objections, nonsense assertions, especially when I have one month to deal with who knows how many assertions.”
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