Former US President Donald Trump
(Picture: REUTERS)A New York judge has been appointed as an independent arbiter in the criminal probe into the presence of classified documents at former US president Donald Trump’s Florida home.
In making the appointment of Raymond Dearie, US District judge Aileen Cannon also refused to allow the Justice Department to resume its use of the highly sensitive records seized in an FBI search last month.
Judge Cannon gave Mr Dearie the task of reviewing the entire tranche of records taken in the August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago and set a November deadline for his work.
In the meantime, she continued to block the department from using for its investigation roughly 100 documents marked as classified that were seized.
The order from Ms Cannon, who was appointed as a judge by Trump, will likely slow the pace of the investigation and set the stage for a challenge to a federal appeals court.
The Justice Department had asked the judge to put on hold her order pausing investigators’ review of classified records by Thursday and said it would ask an appeals court to intervene if she did not.
Ms Cannon made clear in her Thursday order that she was not prepared to blindly accept the government’s characterisations of the documents, saying "evenhanded procedure does not demand unquestioning trust in the determinations of the Department of Justice".
She rejected the department’s position that Mr Trump could not have any ownership interests in the documents, and said she was open to the possibility the former president could raise valid claims of privilege over at least some of the records.
In her order, she noted ongoing disagreements between the two sides about the “proper designation of the seized materials" and the “legal implications flowing from those designations".
"The Court does not find it appropriate to accept the Government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expedited and orderly fashion," she wrote.
The US Justice Department is investigating whether Mr Trump improperly handled records by taking them from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office in January 2021.
US presidents must transfer all of their documents and emails by law to the National Archives.
Among the documents reportedly seized by the FBI in a search were files outlining a foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities, information so sensitive only a few dozen national security officials knew of their existence.
