Why did a judge grant Trump’s request for a ‘special master’?

Monday’s decision by a US federal judge to stop the investigation of Donald Trump’s seizure of classified documents until a “special master” reviews them has thrown the political and legal worlds into uproar – pitting those who believe the ex-president has special legal privileges against those who think he should be treated like any other citizen.

The procedural victory for Trump means the Department of Justice will have to press pause on its effort to determine whether the former president may have illegally run off with classified documents from the White House and kept them at his home in Mar-a-Lago.

Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, agreed to his request that a special master, a kind of independent mediator, review the roughly 11,000 documents that the FBI discovered and seized when it searched Mar-a-Lago last month – some of which the FBI said were marked “classified”, “secret” and “top secret”.

Courts occasionally appoint special masters – typically retired judges or lawyers – to decide if materials seized by subpoenas or search warrants are protected by attorney-client privilege, and therefore exempt from use in court. Unusually, Cannon also authorized the special master in this case to look for documents protected by “executive privilege”.

Executive privilege is the controversial legal doctrine that US presidents, and their staffs, can refuse certain legal demands if they impair national security or the functions of the executive branch.