Judge proposes $500 an hour for former magistrate to help review documents.
The outside expert tapped to sort through former President Donald Trump’s legal claims over documents seized from his Florida home last month is calling for back-up.
U.S. District Court Judge Raymond Dearie, a Brooklyn-based jurist named by a federal judge in Florida to act as a so-called special master in the review of more than 11,000 documents the FBI confiscated, proposed Thursday that former Magistrate Judge James Orenstein help with the process.
“The undersigned has determined that the efficient administration of the Special Master’s duties requires the assistance of the Honorable James Orenstein,” Dearie’s proposed plan for the document review said. The order said Orenstein “has experience with complex case management, privilege review, warrant procedures, and other matters that may arise in the course of the Special Master’s duties.”
Orenstein spent 16 years as a federal magistrate in the same Brooklyn courthouse where Dearie sits. Orenstein drew attention several years ago for his role in what was semi-sarcastically dubbed “the magistrates’ revolt” — rulings from a smattering of federal magistrate judges across the country questioning government tactics in warrant applications seeking electronic data.
In 2016, Orenstein issued a controversial ruling rejecting prosecutors’ arguments that a two-century-old federal law gave the government the right to command Apple to assist in unlocking an iPhone used by an alleged drug dealer. The judge’s pro-privacy stance in that matter may have led the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to appoint him to a list of approved friends of the court who provide their perspective on surveillance requests.
Dearie proposed that the former magistrate, who has a top secret clearance, be paid $500 an hour for work on the Trump documents case. The federal judge who named Dearie as special master, Florida-based Aileen Cannon, has previously ruled that Trump must assume all expenses related to the review.
Dearie said in the Thursday order that he won’t be compensated for his work as he’s still being paid his judge’s salary, but expenses such as Orenstein’s fees must be paid in full and on time or Trump could face court sanctions.
While the seven-page proposal the special master issued Thursday bears Dearie’s name and a form of electronic signature, metadata attached to the document indicates that Orenstein — who retired from the court in 2020–was involved in drafting it. Dearie’s chambers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Orenstein helped prepare the proposal to involve him in the case.
The plan calls for the review of the more than 11,000 documents seized from Mar-a-Lago to take place in four batches. The first involves a small set of information the Justice Department has already flagged as potentially subject to attorney-client privilege. Trump’s team has weekly deadlines stretching through Oct. 14 to identify allegedly privileged material and explain why. Prosecutors have parallel deadlines through Oct. 21, with Dearie scheduled to submit his recommendations to Cannon by Oct. 31
As of now, roughly 100 documents with various national security classification markings that were seized during the search will not be part of the special master process. Cannon ruled that they should be and rebuffed a request by prosecutors to carve those records out.
But Wednesday night, a federal appeals court sided with the Justice Department ruling that the government’s broad authority over classified information made it a mistake for the Trump-appointee to include the alleged secrets in the wider review and for her to put them off-limits to criminal investigators in the meantime.
Trump’s lawyers have yet to indicate whether they plan to ask the Supreme Court to step in and restore Cannon’s original order.
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MORE METADATA MANIA: Special master turns to retired fed magistrate for help in Trump Mar-a-Lago docs fight, plans to pay $500/hour. And guess who helped draft the plan? Yup, same ex-magistrate https://t.co/WHKCWfF9Iu
— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) September 22, 2022
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