Trump legal team balks at declassification questions

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump's legal team has told a newly appointed independent arbiter that it does not want to answer his questions about the declassification status of the documents seized last month from the former president's Florida home, saying that issue could be part of Trump's defense if he's indicted.

Lawyers for Trump and for the Justice Department are to appear in federal court in Brooklyn on Tuesday before a veteran judge named last week as special master to review the roughly 11,000 documents — including about 100 marked as classified — taken during the FBI's Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.

Ahead of the status conference, Raymond Dearie, the special master, requested the two sides to submit a proposed agenda and also provided a draft plan for how he envisions the process moving forward over the next two months.

Trump's lawyers signaled in a Monday evening letter their objection to several aspects of that draft plan, including a request from Dearie that they disclose to him and to the Justice Department information about the classification status of the seized documents.

The resistance to the judge's request was notable because it was Trump's lawyers, not the Justice Department, that had requested the appointment of a special master to conduct an independent review of the documents so that any material covered by claims of legal privilege could be segregated from the investigation — and because the former president's team's recalcitrance included an acknowledgment that the probe could be building toward an indictment.