The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump’s lawyers each presented two options to a federal judge about who should be a “special master” in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge presiding over the case, earlier this week granted the former president’s request to appoint a third-party lawyer, known as a special master, to independently review the material — including more than 100 classified documents – seized by the FBI from his Florida residence and resort.
Trump’s legal team has argued that the Justice Department cannot be trusted to do its own review of potentially privileged material that should be withheld from the criminal investigation. The Justice Department on Thursday appealed the court-ordered special master review, arguing that the order endangered US national security.
Cannon has said it will decide “exact details and mechanics” of the special master proceeding “quickly” after both sides file their motions, but it’s unclear when the judge will rule or what form that ruling will take.
Here are the four people named in the dueling proposals to serve as special master:
Thomas Griffith, a retired federal judge and George W. Bush appointee, served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals from 2005 to 2020. In one of his last major decisions before his retirement, he wrote the majority opinion, rejecting the effort by House Democrats to subpoena Trump’s former White House adviser Don McGahn. (The decision was later overturned.)
In the years since his retirement, Griffith co-authored a report with other prominent conservative lawyers and officials debunking Trump’s lies about massive fraud in the 2020 election. And he publicly endorsed President Joe Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court.
Barbara Jones, another retired federal judge and Clinton appointee, is a former federal prosecutor and retired judge from the Southern District of New York from 1995 to 2012. She brings a lot of specialized experience to the table, having most recently served in that position for three high-profile criminal investigations with political ramifications.
She was tapped to serve as a special master to review materials seized during an FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani’s home and office in April 2021. She was also a special master in the Michael Cohen case, to make sure investigators didn’t wipe out any document that they had attorney-client privilege. Both Giuliani and Cohen were Trump’s lawyers while under investigation by the Justice Department.
Most recently, Jones was the special master who reviewed materials seized by the FBI from Project Veritas, a right-wing group that frequently targets Democrats and media organizations in undercover stings. Jones was hired to review material on First Amendment and attorney-client considerations.
Hack, who has his own law firm, was a partner at the law firm Jones Day, which represented Trump’s 2016 campaign, and is a contributor to the conservative legal group the Federalist Society.
Huck also previously served as deputy attorney general for Florida and as general counsel to former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist — who was a Republican at the time but served as a Democratic member of the U.S. House and is the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida. Chris Kise, Trump’s current lawyer, also worked for Crist and overlaps with Huck. They worked together in the Florida attorney general’s office.
Hack’s wife, Barbara Lagoa, was on Trump’s short list as a Supreme Court nominee following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Dearie, a Reagan nominee, has served as a federal judge in New York since 1986. He retired in 2011 and is now a senior circuit judge.
Dearie also served a seven-year term on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court. He was one of the judges who approved a request by the FBI and the Justice Department to monitor Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page as part of the federal investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
The process federal investigators used to secure the FISA warrants was riddled with errors and general sloppiness, according to a DOJ inspector general report. Two of the four surveillance warrants issued by the secret FISA court on Page have since been invalidated — including one approved by Dearie in June 2017 — because of omissions and errors in the FBI’s court filings.
Diery’s nomination by the Trump team is notable because Trump has repeatedly criticized FISA surveillance and has claimed — without evidence — that it was part of a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his campaign.
