Justice Department accepts Trump nominee as ‘special master’ in top secret papers probe

US District Judge Aileen Cannon must now decide who will fill the role

The Justice Department has said that it is prepared to accept a candidate put forward by Donald Trump’s legal team as “special master” to review top-secret documents taken during the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.

Federal prosecutors stated in a filing late on Monday that senior Judge Raymond Dearie is acceptable, along with its own two nominations, retired federal judges Barbara Jones and Thomas Griffith.

“Each have substantial judicial experience, during which they have presided over federal criminal and civil cases, including federal cases involving national security and privilege concerns,” the DoJ prosecutors wrote.

Judge Dearie was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, and served as a federal judge in New York since the 1980s. He retired in 2011 and is a senior judge in the circuit, according to CNN.

He also served a seven-year term on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, where he gave the FBI and DoJ permission to run surveillance on Carter Page, who was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.

Earlier on Monday, lawyers for Mr Trump explained in court filings why they opposed the Justice Department’s nominees.

“Plaintiff objects to the proposed nominees of the Department of Justice. Plaintiff believes there are specific reasons why those nominees are not preferred for service as Special Master in this case,” the Trump lawyers wrote.

“Therefore, Plaintiff asks this Court for permission to specifically express our objections to the Government’s nominees only at such time that the Court specifies a desire to obtain and consider that information.”

US District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Mr Trump, must now decide who will become the special master.

Last week she issued a ruling which effectively barred the Department of Justice from using any of the documents seized from Mr Trump’s property to further the criminal investigation into the ex-president until a third-party special master could review the documents and determine whether any are privileged.

The documents, seized by agents at Mr Trump’s Florida estate last month, bore markings indicating classification levels ranging from confidential – the lowest level of classification in the US system – to the highest, top secret.

Some bore additional markings denoting them as containing information pertaining to nuclear weapons or human and signals intelligence sources.