US judge hints she may grant Trump request for Mar-a-Lago ‘special master’

A federal judge on Thursday appeared inclined to grant Donald Trump his request to have a so-called special master set aside documents seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago resort that could potentially be subject to privilege protections in the investigation surrounding his unauthorized retention of government secrets.

The Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, did not formally rule from the bench on the former president's request, saying at an hours-long hearing in West Palm Beach, Florida, that she would review the matter further before making a final decision.

But the judge gave serious indications that she would appoint a special master to determine what materials the US justice department can use in its investigation, while potentially allowing for the intelligence community to continue its assessment about whether Trump's retention of the documents risked national security.

"What's the harm?" Cannon asked the government towards the end of the hearing, referring to the prospect of appointing a special master.

The judge also raised repeated concerns over two instances of "inadvertent exposure" of potentially privileged documents to the team conducting the investigation and "some missteps in the execution of the warrant" that suggested the need for an independent arbiter to go through the materials.

According to a justice department lawyer on the filter team that conducted its own review of the seized documents, federal investigators saw a potentially privileged document that was topped with a name of a organization unrelated to the investigation, as well as a second unidentified, potentially privileged document.

The judge also questioned the extent of the potentially privileged documents collected by the FBI that totaled 64 sets of documents amounting to roughly 520 pages, and corrected the justice department that in Nixon vs GSA, the supreme court did not rule that former presidents cannot assert executive privilege.