Dearie is a former US Atty and chief judge of the Eastern District of New York, which covers from Brooklyn east to the end of Long Island.
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 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.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/16/11227259 ... ster-trump
I don't think this will play out like Trump and his lawyers planned, Dearie isn't a rubber stamp judge just because he was appointed by Reagan. Ultimately it will end up at SCOTUS and may be we'll get a clear reading on exactly when Executive Privilege ends.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan