Judge Raymond Dearie will now review the materials seized during the raid on the former president’s estate in August, after Mr Trump successfully applied for one to be appointed. The request was approved by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, and Judge Dearie was a nominee the Justice Department said earlier this week it could also accept. Judge Cannon also rejected the Justice Department’s request for a partial stay of the case and access to the files. “The Court does not see fit to accept the government’s conclusions on these important and contentious issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expeditious and orderly manner,” the judge said. Judge Dearie was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and has served as a federal judge in New York since the 1980s. He retired in 2011 and is a senior circuit judge. 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 surveil Carter Page, who was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. In her 10-page affidavit, released Thursday, Judge Cannon urged Deary to complete his review by Nov. 30. Last week he issued a ruling that effectively barred the Justice Department from using any of the documents seized from Mr. Trump’s estate to advance the criminal investigation against the former president until a special third-party master can review the documents and determine if there are privileged. The documents, seized by agents at Trump’s Florida estate last month, were marked to indicate classification levels ranging from classified – the lowest classification level in the US system – to the highest, top secret. Some carried additional markings indicating that they contained information about nuclear weapons or human sources of intelligence and signals. George Conway, a conservative lawyer but a public critic of Trump, mocked the judge’s decision during an appearance on CNN. “This decision is an absolute disgrace. And I don’t think it’s going to take much to turn that around,” he said. “(Bill) Barr told the New York Times that the original proposal from Donald Trump’s lawyers was a s***, a crock of s***. This opinion is worse than that. “Because this opinion decides a move that focuses only on the documents that were marked classified. And the judge asserts in this opinion, without any basis, that there are factual and legal disputes about these documents. Well, there are no real disputes about whether a document carries classified markings. This is ridiculous.” He added: “There is no doubt that these documents belong to the United States government.”
