The NPR Politics Podcast - Fight Over Trump's Confidential Docs Remains Ugly And Tedious

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey there, it's Ashley Lopez from the NPR Politics Podcast. You might have heard we're going back on the road, and Houston will be heading your way very soon. Join me, Susan Davis, Asma Khalid, Tamara Keith, and Domenico Montanaro at Zilka Hall on Thursday, September 15th. You can find more information about tickets, including student ones, at nprpresents.org. Thanks to our partners at Houston Public Media. We hope to see you there.

Starting point is 00:00:24 Hi, this is Jody and Ryan from Portland, Oregon. And you might hear the end of our summer, a little bit of rain that's finally falling for the first time in months. This podcast was recorded at 2.08 p.m. on Monday, September 12th. Sounds like a tin roof. Things might have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show. These end of summer time stamps make me kind of sad. Summer's my favorite season.

Starting point is 00:00:57 I am sad, but also big, big into fall. You ready for the pumpkin spice lattes? I love a good rain. Right. Yeah, can't complain. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Deepa Shibaram. I also cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

Starting point is 00:01:12 So who's going to be the independent person asked to review the materials seized by the government during the search of former President Donald Trump's Florida estate last month? As you might imagine, Trump and the Justice Department disagree on this matter. So Deepa, let's start with this. Why did the judge overseeing the case ask for what we're calling a special master to be appointed here? Yeah, so the special master, if you recall, is the idea that the court would appoint a third party sort of independent person to look over materials that are considered privileged, right? So in this case, Trump has documents that he was holding at Mar-a-Lago that he considers to

Starting point is 00:01:51 be his. This person, the special master would come in, review that material and act as sort of a third party between the Department of Justice and Trump's lawyers. And so that's why Trump's team had wanted the special master to be called in in the first place. And so that's why Trump's team had wanted the special master to be called in in the first place. And part of the reason why Judge Eileen Cannon, who's the judge in this whole case here, said that she would approve the idea of a special master is because this is a really not normal situation, right? You have a lot of documents that were being held in Trump's home. This is not just a regular person in this case. This is a former president.

Starting point is 00:02:26 And so I think what Judge Cannon was trying to do here, legal experts are saying, is trying to put some neutrality into this situation. Now, there is some disagreement over that. There are legal experts who say that is a good idea. There are those who say, you know, she's not really making the best choice here in assigning a special master, particularly because Trump's team has been so adamant about assigning one. And the DOJ, for their part, has really disagreed with that. They appealed the judge's decision just days ago and say that there is no need for a special master in this case at all. We should note the judge here, Eileen Cannon, was appointed to her position by former President

Starting point is 00:03:03 Trump. What else did they say in their filing, the Justice Department? So yeah, the DOJ appealed that decision. And they also, per the judge, had to outline essentially who they would want to see as a special master, even though they disagree with that decision in the first place. So late Friday night, those court documents came in. The DOJ has made it, again, very clear that they don't want this to happen, but they did offer up two names and they also offered up an idea of what they would want that role to look like, what they would want the special master to have access to,

Starting point is 00:03:35 things about the timeline. So essentially the DOJ has said that they have two people in mind. Lucky them. Lucky them. So the Department of Justice has suggested two retired judges who they think could serve as special master. That was their idea if the appeal fails. And those names are Barbara Jones, who served in the Southern District of New York and was appointed by Bill Clinton to the federal bench. And the other person is a judge named Thomas Griffith, and he was a George W. Bush appointee who served on a federal circuit court in Washington, D.C. And I imagine Trump has very different ideas over who would be the best special master. What has his legal team said?

Starting point is 00:04:13 Trump's legal team proposed retired federal judge Raymond Deary, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan to the Eastern District of New York and who also served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And their second candidate is Paul Huck Jr., a former partner at Jones Day and a contributor to the Federalist Society. And he served in the Florida state government under former Republican governors Charlie Crist, who is now a Democrat, and Rick Scott. Deepa, did these filings cast any light on how we're going to resolve the argument over whether or not Trump owns these documents, whether they're classified or not? There's not a single legal expert that says that he does. But the Trump team has gone from calling this a dispute like argument over an overdue library book to saying now that this is a document storage dispute that spiraled out of control. Is this special master going to resolve the question of whether Trump owns these documents or not, or had any right to have them?

Starting point is 00:05:13 So that's a little unclear at this point. I will say two things. One, the DOJ appealed that call for a special master like we talked about, and then today Trump's lawyers responded to that appeal. And they leaned into what they've been saying this whole time, exactly what you were talking about, that Trump had the right to have these documents, that any kind of investigation into this would cause irreparable harm to his reputation and to the public. And they went on, nothing new there from what we've already heard. But they do have, the DOJ and Trump, have a pretty large disagreement about what the

Starting point is 00:05:47 special master would even have access to if the special master goes forward and is a part of this investigation. So Trump's lawyers have been really adamant that the special master, whoever it may be, if they do come up in this investigation, should have access to all of these documents. They want even classified documents. The special master should have access to all of these documents. They want even classified documents. The special master should be able to go through everything. And the DOJ for their part has been really adamant that there should be some documents that are really classified that the special master shouldn't have access to. So at this point, the question is that we don't really

Starting point is 00:06:21 know. We don't really know how that will end up and whether the special master will even have access to all those documents to kind of go through that question in the first place. All right, we need to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. And we're back. And Mara, I mean, it's been stated, but we should restate it. This is an extraordinary fight that we are following right now. I mean, this isn't just a citizen and classified documents. This is the former president of the United States holding what we believe to be very sensitive and classified documents at his personal home in unsecured, certainly outside the parameters of secure information to the United States government. And he's in an all out fight against the U. the US Justice Department right now. Yep, he really is. And don't forget, this has been going on for a long time. He kept a lot of this information after the government

Starting point is 00:07:13 asked for it back. It's really clear that most of this information does not belong to him. The Department of Justice in their filing has said, okay, maybe it was mixed in with some of Trump's personal effects, passports and other things. The special master can weed those out. But this really is an argument about whether the former president has some kind of special privilege if he's above the law on this. And what makes it incredibly ironic is if you remember back in 2016, Lock Her Up, the Trump rally chant about Hillary Clinton, she should be locked up because she mishandled classified documents, even though a government review showed that she hadn't. But we know that Donald Trump has a history of being very loose with classified information. When he was the president, he actually shared some information with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office that

Starting point is 00:08:00 caused an Israeli program to be shut down. So we really don't know what he was planning to do with these documents. Were they just souvenirs? Why did he want to keep them? And why did he resist handing them over after months and months of the government asking for them back? And that's a key thing. And we should also note that beyond the Justice Department question, I mean, the national security infrastructure is also trying to do a risk assessment.

Starting point is 00:08:23 I mean, of knowing what was there, who might have had access to it. It is known that, you know, people come and go out of Mar-a-Lago all day long. That's right. People who have had ties to other foreign governments. We don't know who's coming in and out of Mar-a-Lago. We don't know who had access to these documents. Yeah, I just think about it from Capitol Hill when they have like classified briefings, like the layers by which even members of Congress with security clearances have to go through to go see information and like so-called, you know, in the skiffs, they have to leave electronics outside. parameters that I think that the security infrastructure and certainly the picture of the classified information files on the ground at Mar-a-Lago cannot do much for the national security worldview on this. Deepa, I have to imagine that this is not the end of the road here. It sounds like there's probably a lot more to come on this. There is. There's a couple things

Starting point is 00:09:21 that still need to be hashed out like you can imagine. One of them is just the basic timeline on this, right? So in that filing that came late Friday night, both parties, DOJ and Trump, can't even really come to the same page on how long this process would take if a special master were to get involved. Trump's team said that the special master should have 90 days to look through all the documents that are provided. And the DOJ is saying, you know, we only want till October 12th. So there's that question still hanging.

Starting point is 00:09:49 We need to hear from the judge on that. And then the other question is, who's going to pay? You know, this is another third party person coming into the investigation. It's not exactly like they're doing it for free. And Trump's team says, OK, well, the DOJ and our lawyers can split the cost. And the DOJ is saying, well, you're the one who wanted a special master in the first place, so you should pay for the cost. And those are all things that still need to be hammered out in order for this investigation to move forward. And like you guys were talking about just a second

Starting point is 00:10:17 ago, the national security implications of this, that investigation and that look into it has kind of paused while this criminal investigation has also been paused. So there is a big standstill here overall. And in between all this, Mara, he might still run for president again in 2024. Yes. And not only that, he might announce that he'll run for president before the midterms. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Susan Davis, I cover politics I'm Deepa Shivaram, I cover politics

Starting point is 00:10:47 and I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent and thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast

The NPR Politics Podcast - Fight Over Trump's Confidential Docs Remains Ugly And Tedious

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