Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy sounded off Monday over a federal judge granting Donald Trump's request for a special master to review materials seized at Mar-a-Lago, telling "Fox News Live" the Justice Department assumed the former president only had attorney-client privilege and not executive privilege as well.
ANDY MCCARTHY: It’s a big win for the Trump team and a potentially explosive ruling if it holds. I would imagine it’s important enough that the government will appeal this immediately. In a nutshell, what happened here is the Justice Department assumed that Trump only had attorney-client privilege, that he did not have executive privilege, or at least to the limited extent that as a former president he maintains executive privilege, it can’t be asserted against the executive branch itself. It's one thing for the government to have that theory, I think it actually may be a sound theory. The problem is it’s not 100% settled, so I thought it was incumbent on them to get a ruling from the court on that question before they hauled off did what they did, which was have the privilege team go through all the seized documents assuming that Trump only had attorney-client privilege and then allowing all of the potentially executive privileged documents to go to the prosecution team.
FEDERAL JUDGE ORDERS APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL MASTER TO REVIEW SEIZED TRUMP RECORDS
If it turned out they are privileged, that could taint the prosecutors who reviewed them and it could also taint their investigation because they are now conducting an investigation. They got these documents two weeks ago, and they have had these documents, the prosecution team has, for about a week. So they have been merrily conducting their investigation with the agents assuming all the documents were appropriate for the investigation. Now the judge is saying hold everything, he may have executive privilege.
WATCH FULL INTERVIEW HERE:
