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Welcome to a special episode of advisory opinions and I say special because it's me doing your intro today Sarah is good

David French is on vacation and while the cat is away this mice has invited lots of special guests on the podcast

We're going to start obviously with the special master opinion coming out of Florida and the Mar-a-Lago search of Donald Trump

But then we're going to talk a little bit more corpus linguistics with someone fresh off the Utah Supreme Court the master himself

My special guest at the top of the show professor or incur at Berkeley law school if you are feeling good about yourself and how smart you are as you tuned into this podcast let me read you a little bit of professor curves bio and change your mind

Well, first he started at Princeton with a mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering degree then he just went ahead and did some graduate study at Stanford and mechanical engineering got a master's there Harvard law school sure he graduated magna cum loud went on to clerk on the third circuit and then for justice Kennedy

Yada yada yada he is the fourth amendment expert and there is nobody better to talk to about this special master stuff by the way you should be following him on Twitter or in curve oh R I N K E R R

He is he's one of those just smart legal minds that doesn't do hot takes is it trying to dumb it down he'll do a threat if he needs to always very interesting to watch him thinking through stuff on Twitter he's my go to follow on all of this professor curve welcome

Sarah so great to be with you and very kind comments very happy to be here fan of the fan of the podcast

We're going to try to dive into all of this I want to catch people up so if you remember the Department of Justice executes a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago now just over a month ago they have that signed off by a magistrate judge in Florida

that is all the criminal proceeding and that will continue under the supervision if you will of that magistrate judge in the course of getting documents from Mar-a-Lago in that search warrant they get about 11,000 documents and at that point the Department Institute something called a filter team so before the investigative folks FBI agents and Department lawyers can look at any of the documents that have been retrieved from Mar-a-Lago

filter team made up of totally separate people though also Department of Justice employees review all those documents to filter out for instance attorney client privilege documents by which it would cover both documents with the White House Council as attorney client privilege and also private lawyer documents

and personal things that can be returned like the passports that we heard so much about things like that they did not they were not reviewing for executive privilege we'll talk about that in a minute

and about two weeks after the search was executed the Trump team files a civil lawsuit in front of a different judge that's what we're going to be talking about today the civil lawsuit asking for a special master

the judge immediately says she's interested in this she's leaning towards it it takes another nine days for her to issue her final opinion granting the special master in the meantime the Department of Justice says that the filter team already completed it the investigative folks have already looked at all this stuff

there's a lot to unpack here so professor there's three main topics I want to talk about

jurisdiction standing and mootness slash delay and then we can maybe talk some executive privilege which is frankly outside both of our expertise but everyone can be an executive privilege expertise today in part because there's actually not a whole lot of law on it

it's a lot more philosophy than law at this point and I think that's worth some diving in so will you explain to folks under you know fourth amendment war it type stuff how you can have one judge signing off on the war it and another judge now in a civil lawsuit appointing a special master

yeah so this is sort of one part among many that is odd about this case ordinarily a search warrant is issued by a particular judge the judge has jurisdiction over the matter of the search warrant and then if you have problems with that warrant you then go back to that judge and say basically hey this is your court order

modify this amend this do something here and and really all a warrant is is a court order saying a search has to occur and here are the rules for that search and so normally you go back to the judge that that's their order

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