Special master loses patience with Trump's nonsense objections: 'Where's the beef?'

On Tuesday afternoon, Judge Raymond Dearie, who is acting as “special master” in Donald Trump’s attempt to claim ownership over documents seized in an FBI search at his Mar-a-Lago club, conducted a conference call that was supposed to be restricted to dealing with a small portion of the documents. In this case, the call was aimed only at those documents that had already been culled by the FBI “filter team” that was set up to find documents potentially protected by client-attorney privilege and which the Department of Justice has already excluded from their investigations. However, the conversation soon sprawled to all parts of the special master process, and during this conversation Dearie made it exceptionally clear that his patience is beyond exhausted.

For everyone who spent a week contorting hyperspace in an effort to explain how 200,000 pages could fit into 32 small boxes, we finally got an answer as to how many pages were really in all those documents: 21,792. That greatly reduced number didn’t stop Trump’s team from once again asking for more time.

Trump’s attorney also submitted a preliminary list of documents pulled by the filter team that Trump believed should be returned to him under some form of privilege. Except what Trump’s legal team failed to provide was any details to support why those documents should not be part of the DOJ’s investigation. “It’s a little perplexing,” The New York Times reported that Judge Dearie said on the call. “As I go through the log. What’s the expression? Where’s the beef? I need some beef.”