The former president's lawyers were warned that their initial attempts to claim certain records were personal and not presidential might be lacking.
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The beef is not located. US District Senior Judge Raymond Dearie told the attorneys that he needed some meat.
At least one document was personal to Trump and covered by executive privilege, a protection that applies to government information, according to Trump's lawyers.
Dearie scolded lawyers for Trump and the Justice Department for a dispute over a document. It is an unsigned letter from Trump's personal law firm at the time to Robert Muller during his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
There was a fight over who was responsible for making sure the letter was legit. The Trump team was blamed by a Justice Department lawyer. The government would know if they had the document in their possession according to one of Trump's lawyers.
There are nonsense objections.
The judge warned that he had no patience for either of them and ordered them to sort out the issue of whether it was sent or not.
Dearie doesn't want to deal with nonsense objections.
Dearie is looking at an initial list of disputes over a small subset of documents. He said that neither side gave him enough information to make a recommendation about Trump's claims.
Dearie asked for the names of the former president's personal lawyers, details about any litigation related to a particular document, and whether evidence that a third party was involved with a document meant it couldn't be privileged.
According to Dearie, the documents flagged by the filter team did not appear to be drafted by Trump's lawyers or feature legal advice. Dearie didn't specify what those documents were about, but the page numbers he matched entries in the filter team log for documents related to Trump's possible grants of executive clemency
Privilege or personal.
Some government records should be off limits in the federal criminal probe because they should be considered personal under the Presidential Records Act, according to Trump. Dearie said the entries in the log he had received so far were "perplexing" and that he needed more information from Trump's lawyers.
The government and Trump disagree about shielding from investigators the records that were seized from Mar-a-Lago.
The special master's proposal for the parties to review documents in smaller batches and list disputes on a rolling basis was rejected by the judge who appointed him. He wasn't sure if there would be 10 or 10,000 areas of disagreement and he was worried about having enough staff to go through them all.
He asked the parties to give him an estimate of what to expect even though he had no power to change Cannon's timetable. Cannon will make the final rulings after he submits his recommendations.
There is an updated version of the hearing information.
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