The U.S. judge named to review documents seized by the FBI last month at Donald Trump's Florida home pressed Trump's lawyers on Tuesday to say whether they plan to assert that the records had been declassified by the former president, as he has claimed.
Judge Raymond Dearie — serving as an independent arbiter, or special master, to vet the more than 11,000 seized documents and potentially recommend keeping some away from federal investigators — asked Trump's lawyers why he should not consider records marked classified as genuinely classified.
"If the government gives me prima facie evidence (a legal term meaning a fact presumed to be true unless disproved) that this is classified, and you decide not to advance a claim of declassification ... as far as I'm concerned that's the end of it," Dearie told Trump's lawyers in his first public hearing on the matter.