The Justice Department and Donald Trump's legal team have proposed candidates to serve as an independent arbiter in the investigation into top-secret information found in an FBI search of the former president's Florida home.
's legal team each proposed candidates Friday for the role of an independent arbiter in the investigation into top-secret documents found at the former president's Florida home, but the two sides differed on the scope of duties the person would have.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon had given both sides until Friday to submit potential candidates for the role of a special master, as well as proposals for the scope of the person's duties and the schedule for his or her work. The back-and-forth over the special master is playing out amid an FBI investigation into the retention of several hundred classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago within the past year. Though the legal wrangling is unlikely to have major long-term effects on the investigation or knock it significantly off course, it will almost certainly delay it by potentially months and has already caused the intelligence community to temporarily pause a national security risk assessment.
Central to the dispute is precisely what documents the yet-to-be-named special master should be tasked with reviewing. Roughly 11,000 documents -- including more than 100 with classified markings, some at the top-secret level -- were recovered during the FBI's Aug. 8 search. In granting the request for a special master, Cannon had directed the department to temporarily pause its use of the seized records for investigative purposes.
And the lawyers say that if any document is a presidential document, then Trump has an "absolute right of access to it.""Thus, President Trump cannot be denied access to those documents, which in this matter gives legal authorization to the Special Master to engage in first-hand review," the filing states.
Griffith, the other Justice Department selection, was named to the federal appeals court in Washington in 2005 by then-president George W. Bush, and previously represented the institutional interests of the Republican-led Senate during the impeachment case against former President Bill Clinton.
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