APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY: New Details About Judge Who Approved Mar-A-Lago Raid Raises All Sorts of Red Flags. It seems the Justice Department should have put an issue of this magnitude before a full federal judge, rather than a magistrate, and that maybe it should have found someone without an Epstein connection. Maybe there’s nothing actually wrong here, but you can’t blame people for wondering. And maybe they figured that if they’d put it in front of that sort of a judge he would have laughed and told them to go away.