The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump’s legal team have found rare agreement in a potential candidate to serve as the special master tasked with reviewing the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump’s legal team have found rare agreement in a potential candidate to serve as the special master tasked with reviewing the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Judge Raymond Dearie, whom Trump’s legal team put forward, is an acceptable option to serve as the third-party attorney to independently review the seized materials, the Justice Department said in a court filing Monday evening.
While it remains unclear when US District Judge Aileen Cannon will decide who will serve as the special master, here’s what you need to know about Dearie and the role he could play in the investigation.
Dearie, a Reagan nominee, has served as a federal judge in New York since 1986. He retired in 2011 and is now a senior judge on the circuit.
He also served a seven-year term on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court.
Dearie was one of the judges who approved an FBI and DOJ request to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, as part of the federal inquiry into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
The process that federal investigators used to secure the FISA warrants was riddled with errors and overall sloppiness, according to a DOJ inspector general report.
