mishandling secret documents and possibly being in violation of law. it s never happened before. now, in the past it s been it s very common to have special masters where you have what are called attorney/client privilege documents. those are very straightforward. everybody has them if they have had an attorney or put a will together or anything like that, special executive privilege is just far more complex, so look, to find a special master, you re going to have to find someone who s well versed in the law of sort of how the branchs of government work. number two, either has had or can get a very top secret, very selective security clearance because of the fact they re going to be handling sensitive information, and number three, it s got to be somebody who s going to be seen by the public as not being tainted by politics, democratic or republican, it s bad for the justice department if it s somebody who appears to be
i think the biggest argument looming over this is whether or not the special master is necessary because the doj is going to want to make sure that this is going to be tight to just in terms of attorney/client privilege documents and going to say, essentially, that we have already gone through this and identified any attorney-client privilege documents. what donald trump is going to try to do is try to broaden this out beyond attorney-client privilege documents. theoretically a lot of these documents that are protected by classification shouldn t be attorney client privilege documents and shouldn t be relevant to the question of whether, in fact, he had the possession of these documents he wasn t supposed to possess, setting aside the fact that he wasn t supposed to possess any documents because those are records properly belong to the american people under the presidential records act and shouldn t be in a former president s control even if they aren t classified. setting that aside
saying, hey, we ve had filter teams, tank teams look at this, we ve separated out the attorney/client privilege documents, and we ve even did consultations on the classified documents to make sure that all the materials are properly classified. so there s really no need for a new special master to come in. would the timing issue also come into play for the judge potentially who could look at this and say, well, maybe in the beginning you might have needed one, but given that all this work has already been done, and i find it to be above board in this filing, if that s what the judge finds, then could that be? that s a very an excellent argument. and i think a lot of lawyers who have looked at that thought that this application be thrown out immediately. they should have been in there the next day making this application, before other people in the fibi and the doj got involved in reviewing the materials. the judge could easily say that. she s hinted she might go along with the sp
also joining me senior law enforcement analyst andrew mccabe, former deputy director of the fbi and cnn legal analyst paul callan. it s important to lay out where we are at this point. the fact that the former president s legal team was asking for the special master, some of the questions that were immediately raised when that was filed is that it had already been two weeks at that point since the since those documents had been taken from mar-a-lago. and would there even be a need? what would be happening in those two weeks? is there a chance that they could have gone through all the documents? it is definitely possible, erica, they ve gone through the documents at least preliminarily the i should point out that use of the filter in this case was landlocked from the beginning. we look at the affidavit [ poor audio ]
handled in a very, very extra special way, that we wouldn t be handled in normal cases. as we wait and watch for that, we also know that there is this review, this damage assessment that is happening now. looking at this the materials, right, the d&i, looking at recovered documents to determine whether there was any real harm done to america s national security. when we talk about that damage assessment, what are they looking for? that sources could have been compromised and have to pull them out for personal safety? is it a broader issue with national security as a whole? it is exactly what you said, erica. this is an effort to identify those intelligence collection techniques that might have been compromised by the unauthorized storing of these documents. so the reviewers go into and say let s assume the worst case sce scenario. if the information contained in documents has ended up in the hands of our adversaries, what would we need to do.