Trump records probe: Tensions flare over special master

WASHINGTON (AP) — The parallel special master process spawned by the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Florida estate has slowed the Justice Department’s criminal investigation and exposed simmering tensions between department prosecutors and lawyers for the former president.

As the probe into the presence of top-secret information at Mar-a-Lago continues, barbed comments in recent court filings have laid bare deep disagreements related to the special master’s work — not just among lawyers but judges, too. And the filings have made clear that a process the Trump team initially asked for has not consistently played to the ex-president’s advantage.

The past week has revealed stark divisions in how both sides envision the process playing out, as well as the precise role the special master should have.

An early hint surfaced when the Trump team resisted Dearie’s request for any information to support the idea that the Mar-a-Lago documents had been declassified, as Trump has repeatedly asserted. A lawyer for Trump, James Trusty, said that inquiry was “premature” and “a little beyond” what Cannon had in mind at the time she appointed the special master. The following day, in a setback for the Trump team, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overruled an order from Cannon that had temporarily halted the Justice Department’s ability to use the seized classified documents in its probe. Besides restoring the department’s access, the order also lifted Cannon’s mandate that investigators give the special master those records. More conflict followed, this time related to the scanning and processing of non-classified government records that were seized.

Government lawyers revealed in a letter Tuesday that none of the five document-review vendors they had recommended for the job was “willing to be engaged” by the Trump team. The Justice Department said it was confident it would be able to secure the arrangements on its own while noting that it continued to expect the Trump team to pay.

But Trusty responded with his own letter Wednesday attributing the difficulty in securing a vendor to the sheer quantity of documents, which he said totaled roughly 200,000 pages — a number the Justice Department has not itself stated in court filings.