A courtroom sketch of Judge Raymond Dearie in New York in January 2013.
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A courtroom sketch of Judge Raymond Dearie in New York in January 2013.
Reuters
Judge Aileen Cannon has appointed Judge Raymond Dearie as the special master to review documents seized during a court-approved search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home in August.
Dearie, 78, a former chief judge of the federal court in the Eastern District of New York, was one of the special master candidates suggested by Trump whom the Justice Department did not object to.
Cannon directed Dearie to issue interim reports and recommendations “as appropriate” during the review and set a Nov. 30 deadline to complete his work. The Justice Department has said it will appeal the order for a special master.
Here’s what you need to know about the special master’s background.
Republican President Ronald Reagan appointed Dearie, then 41, to serve as a federal judge in New York in 1986, and he assumed senior status in 2011. Justice Department lawyers have said that Dearie has “substantial judicial experience” and is thus qualified for the special master job.
Dearie got his law degree from St. John’s University School of Law in 1969 and then eventually served as an attorney for the Eastern District of New York before Reagan tapped him to serve as a judge. He went on to serve as chief judge from 2007 to 2011.
Andrew Weissmann, a federal prosecutor, a former senior member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and a special master himself, described Dearie as “compassionate” and “fair” and the “platonic ideal of what you want in a judge.”
“If you asked both prosecutors and lawyers, they would say the same thing, that he is just so fair,” Weissmann said. “It’s unusual to have a judge where both sides just have enormous praise for somebody.”
When Weissmann was starting out as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, the judge was late for a court appearance. “A few days later, I got in the mail a handwritten apology from him,” Weissmann recalled. The defense lawyer got the same letter from the judge. “It was just remarkable because judges have a lot of power — they don’t need to do that,” Weissmann said.
And in a statement to NPR, Daniel R. Alonso, partner at Buckley LLP and a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, called Dearie an “old-school gentleman and unfailingly polite.”
“Judge Dearie is a judge who, though unfailingly fair, would never tolerate the kinds of arguments that Trump’s lawyers tend to put forward,” Alonso said.
In this role, Dearie was one of the judges who approved an FBI and Justice Department request to surveil Carter Page, then a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
This was part of the inquiry to find out whether Russia had meddled with the 2016 presidential election. There were several errors by the FBI in this process, according to the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, and of the four surveillance warrants granted by the FISA court, two were declared invalid, including one approved by Dearie.
During his active time as judge at the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., Dearie sentenced Abid Naseer to 40 years in prison. The Pakistani was a member of al-Qaida and plotted, but didn’t carry out, attacks on a shopping center in Manchester, England; the New York City subway system; and a Danish newspaper. Naseer had faced a possible life sentence.
Naseer, who represented himself in court, tried to appeal to the judge as someone who was not a threat to society. “Dear judge, it is true I have spent most of my life in search of studies and not extremism and fundamentalism,” he said. ”I’m not, nor have I been, a career criminal.” Dearie replied: ”I know you’re not. You’re a terrorist.”
Dearie also handled cases involving organized crime, including one against the head of a crime family who made attempts to falsify a mental illness to try to avoid standing trial, including appearing in pajamas and a bathrobe in the streets, talking to himself and even urinating in public. He was later sentenced, but not by Dearie.
In remarks to the New York Criminal Bar Association in 2016, he called for the criminal justice system to be “rethought and retooled significantly.”
“If society relies on the jail cell alone to bring relief to the streets of New York or Chicago, or to fight the heroin epidemic that has invaded our communities, little will change,” he said, adding that he wondered “how we as a society would fare if we took a fraction of the money we spend on warehousing people and invested it in programs to reach those vulnerable to the hollow call of the streets.”
Dearie admitted that at times, he wanted “to scream out in frustration, sadness and anger” when he was required to impose a mandatory sentence.
He continued:
We too often ignore the issues, the causes, the needs, sit back as a society, wait for them to commit crimes, prosecute them with great gusto, root for a stiff sentence and then pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, too often filling the prisons with scores of nonviolent offenders, often destroying the salvageable with cruelly lengthy sentences and risking the well-being of innocent family members.
In August, Dearie decided he wanted to move to an inactive status as a judge, a step just short of formal retirement. But it’s unclear yet when that shift will eventually happen, one of his staff members told NPR. As an inactive judge, Dearie could return to the bench, if needed.
“I’m going to miss it,” he told New York Law Journal.
Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2022/09/16/1122725989/judge-raymond-dearie-mar-a-lago-special-master-trump
Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a defense research institute in Arlington, Va., said the Kremlin’s first step would likely be to call up reserve officers and others with more recent military experience to replenish badly depleted units in the field, perhaps in the next month or so. The Russian military has been identifying such personnel for months in anticipation of Mr. Putin’s order, he said.
“Bottom line, it’s not going to change a lot of the problems the Russian military has had in this war, and the military will be limited as to how many additional forces it can deploy in the field,” Mr. Kofman said. “But it does begin to address the structural problems that Russia has had with manpower shortages and will extend Russia’s ability to sustain this war.”
Crucially, Mr. Kofman said, Mr. Putin’s announcement extends indefinitely the service contracts of thousands of soldiers who signed up thinking that they would only serve several months, and enacts policies and penalties to prevent them from refusing deployment to Ukraine or leaving the service.
Even if Moscow can mobilize some reservists quickly, the Russian military faces serious longer-term shortages in equipment, vehicles and weaponry, and generating entire new units to replace those lost in battle might not happen until early next year, some officials said.
“It will be many months before they can be properly equipped, trained, organized and deployed to Ukraine,” said Frederick B. Hodges, a former top U.S. Army commander in Europe. “And without massive artillery support, these new soldiers will be pure cannon fodder, sitting in cold, wet trenches this winter as Ukrainian forces continue to press.”
Mr. Putin’s struggles to mobilize enough regular troops has forced the Kremlin to rely on a patchwork of impoverished ethnic minorities, Ukrainians from the separatist territories, mercenaries and militarized National Guard units to fight the war.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/us/politics/putin-ukraine-biden.html
The latest: Ukrainian forces said Wednesday that they pushed back Russian advances in the country’s second-most-populous city and regained control of Pytomnyk, a village to the north of Kharkiv. Finland’s leaders said they support a NATO membership bid as soon as possible, an extraordinary move that demonstrates the far-ranging effects of Russia’s invasion.
The fight: Russian forces continue to mount sporadic attacks on civilian targets in a number of Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian prosecutors have been taking detailed testimony from victims to investigate Russian war crimes.
The weapons: Ukraine is making use of weapons such as Javelin antitank missiles and Switchblade “kamikaze” drones, provided by the United States and other allies. Russia has used an array of weapons against Ukraine, some of which have drawn the attention and concern of analysts.
Photos: Post photographers have been on the ground from the very beginning of the war — here’s some of their most powerful work.
How you can help: Here are ways those in the U.S. can help support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.
Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video.
Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/12/finland-nato-membership-russia-ukraine/