Judge warns Trump lawyers more detail needed in their documents case

The special master reviewing documents seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate warned the former president’s lawyers that their initial efforts to claim certain records were personal and not presidential might be lacking enough detail.

“Where’s the beef? I need some beef, US district senior judge Raymond Dearie told the lawyers during a telephone status hearing Tuesday.

Mr Dearie also suggested there was a “certain incongruity to Trump’s lawyers claiming so far that at least one document was both personal to Trump and covered by executive privilege, a protection that applies to government information.

The judge chastised lawyers for Mr Trump and the Justice Department for a dispute over a document Mr Trump says is shielded by a privilege for legal materials. It’s an unsigned June 2017 letter from Mr Trump’s personal law firm at the time to former special counsel Robert Mueller during his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to a mistakenly unsealed list of materials previously reported by Bloomberg News.

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Both sides sparred over who was responsible for confirming whether Mr Trump’s attorneys actually sent the letter to the government.

A Justice Department lawyer said it was the Mr Trump team’s fault for not providing more information. One of Mr Trump’s lawyers said the government would know if they had the document in their possession, suggesting there was “gamesmanship afoot”.

“I have no patience for either one of you on this point, the judge warned, directing them to sort out what he considered to be a factual issue of whether it was sent or not. I don’t want to be dealing with nonsense objections.”

The judge is reviewing an early list of disputes over a small subset of documents flagged as potentially privileged by a special government filter team. He said that neither side provided him with enough facts to make recommendations about Mr Trump’s claims that certain documents are protected attorney-client communications or other legal work.

The former president has argued in court that at least some government records should be off limits in the federal criminal investigation because they should be considered “personal under the Presidential Records Act or covered by executive privilege”.

Mr Dearie indicated he would need more information from Mr Trump’s lawyers to support such claims, saying the entries in the log he had received so far were “perplexing”, prompting his “beef” quip. — Bloomberg