Team Trump pushes back against its own special master in docs case – By Steve Benen (MSNBC) / Sept 20, 2022
Team Trump asked for a specific special master in the Mar-a-Lago case, but he’s now asking for information Team Trump doesn’t want to share.
In the scandal surrounding the classified documents Donald Trump kept at Mar-a-Lago, the former president and his lawyers appear to have everything they want. Team Trump insisted that a Trump-appointed judge assign a special master in the case to review the materials, and she complied. Team Trump asked for a specific judge to fill the role, and the Justice Department complied.
It’s against this backdrop that the former president and his defense attorneys still have a problem, not with prosecutors, but with the special master they sought out. NBC News reported:
“Donald Trump’s attorneys said in a filing Monday night that they don’t want to disclose to a court-appointed special master which Mar-a-Lago documents they assert the former president may or may not have declassified. In a four-page letter to the special master, Trump’s attorneys pushed back against Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie’s apparent proposal that they submit “specific information regarding declassification” to him in the course of his review.”
In other words, the Trump-requested arbiter asked the former president and his lawyers to disclose details about the documents he claims to have declassified. They responded that they don’t want to comply.
