Do you need more evidence that stacking the courts was Mitch McConnell's finest contribution?

[Trump-nominated federal court judge Aileen Cannon] has named Raymond Dearie, a senior US district judge with experience handling US national security matters, as an independent arbiter to vet records seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Florida estate in an ongoing criminal investigation.

[...]

Dearie was one of two candidates for the post proposed by the former president, and the US justice department had said it would not oppose his appointment.

[...]

Dearie, who is 78 and based in Brooklyn, is tasked with deciding whether any of the documents seized by the FBI during the August search are privileged – either due to attorney-client confidentiality or through a legal principle called executive privilege – and should be off limits to federal investigators.

Dearie has until 30 November – after the midterms – to finish the review.

  Guardian

After the midterms. That was important.

Trump will be required to pay costs associated with the special master.

No problem. He'll just get the rubes to cover the cost.

The justice department had said in a court filing on Monday that Dearie’s experience as a judge qualified him for the special master role, but opposed the other candidate proposed by Trump’s team, private attorney Paul Huck. Trump’s lawyers opposed the two retired federal judges proposed by the department.

Of course they did.

Dearie was appointed in 2011 to the foreign intelligence surveillance court, which reviews warrant applications from the US government on matters of national security, where he served until 2019.

In 2017, he was one of four federal judges who approved warrants used to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page amid concern about Trump campaign contacts with Russians, according to papers released to media outlets that sued for the records.

If Judge Dearie has anything left of impartiality and a sense of actual justice, he'll move ASAP. And he'll recognize the bullshit that got him to this point.

In ruling in favor of Trump’s request for a special master, Cannon rejected the department’s arguments that the records belong to the government and that because Trump is no longer president he cannot claim executive privilege. Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2020.

Assumptions about Dearie can't be fairly made without background. Here's some more:

In remarks to the New York Criminal Bar Association in 2016, he called for the criminal justice system to be "rethought and retooled significantly."

"If society relies on the jail cell alone to bring relief to the streets of New York or Chicago, or to fight the heroin epidemic that has invaded our communities, little will change," he said, adding that he wondered "how we as a society would fare if we took a fraction of the money we spend on warehousing people and invested it in programs to reach those vulnerable to the hollow call of the streets."

[...]

Andrew Weissmann, a federal prosecutor, a former senior member of special counsel Robert Mueller's team and a special master himself, described Dearie as "compassionate" and "fair" and the "platonic ideal of what you want in a judge."

"If you asked both prosecutors and lawyers, they would say the same thing, that he is just so fair," Weissmann said. "It's unusual to have a judge where both sides just have enormous praise for somebody."

[...]

And in a statement to NPR, Daniel R. Alonso, partner at Buckley LLP and a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, called Dearie an "old-school gentleman and unfailingly polite."

"Judge Dearie is a judge who, though unfailingly fair, would never tolerate the kinds of arguments that Trump's lawyers tend to put forward," Alonso said.

  NPR

We shall see. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Next up: DOJ appeals

UPDATE: