Justice Department, Trump team clash over arbiter

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and lawyers for former President Donald Trump failed to agree on who could serve as an independent arbiter to sift through documents the FBI seized from Trump’s Florida club and residence last month.

In a joint filing Friday night, the two sides exhibited sharply divergent visions for what the arbiter, known as a special master, would do, and put forth different candidates.

The Justice Department proposed two former U.S. District Court judges for the position: Barbara Jones, a Clinton appointee to the Southern District of New York who performed a similar role in cases involving two personal lawyers for Trump, Michael Cohen in 2017 and Rudy Giuliani in 2021; and Thomas Griffith, a George W. Bush appointee who retired from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2020.

Trump’s legal team countered with two suggestions of its own: a retired U.S. District Court judge, Raymond Dearie, a Reagan appointee who sat in the Eastern District of New York and once served as the top federal prosecutor there; and Paul Huck Jr., a former deputy attorney general in Florida who also served as general counsel to Charlie Crist, who was its Republican governor at the time.

Huck is married to Judge Barbara Lagoa, whom Trump appointed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which oversees federal courts in Florida. Such an appointment would appear to create a conflict of interest that could require Lagoa to recuse herself from litigation involving the case.

Judge Aileen Cannon, who ordered the parties to produce a list of qualified candidates, will ultimately decide who will be tapped for the job. She will also set the parameters of the review.

The Justice Department, seeking to quickly finish its investigation into Trump’s handling of sensitive government documents, proposed setting a deadline of Oct. 17 for completion of the arbiter’s work; Trump’s team suggested taking 90 days.

The department also said Trump should pay for the master since he had asked for it; Trump’s team proposed that taxpayers split the cost.

The two sides also clashed over the duties of the special master. Trump’s lawyers argued that the arbiter should look at all the documents seized in the search and filter out anything potentially subject to attorneyclient or executive privilege.

By contrast, the government argued that the master should look only at unclassified documents and should not adjudicate whether anything was subject to executive privilege.