A U.S. District judge ruled in a tense legal standoff in a Florida federal court Thursday that the government needs to cough up more details of what the 30 FBI agents grabbed in the raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in August.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee with bipartisan support, heard arguments about whether a special master should decide which documents that agents took from the former president’s home are privileged and/or his to retain. She’s put off the decision until later but ruled that federal attorneys must turn over much more detailed information on their inventory of what they took from Trump’s home when FBI agents, at Joe Biden and AG Merrick Garland’s behest, raided and occupied it for nine hours on August 8.
So when Democrats trash Judge Cannon as a "Trump judge," ask them why 12 of the 33 Senate Democrats (36%) who decided to show up to work that day voted to confirm Judge Cannon's nomination to a lifetime-appointed federal judgeship.
(fixed my bad math)https://t.co/Vj8Pf7pltN
— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) September 1, 2022
Predictably, however, Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Jay Bratt argued that since Donald Trump wasn’t president anymore he couldn’t have access to documents. For anyone playing the home game, this is an absurd argument. All presidents — even Bill “nuclear codes in his sock drawer” Clinton — retain their classified clearances. But we’re talking about Trump derangement syndrome afflicted feds, so norms are tossed out.
The government will also argue that since the team of FBI agents on the tainted “taint team” already went through the documents, the judge can trust them that they made the right decision on which ones Trump can keep and which ones must go. Of course, this is the same FBI filter team that admitted in court earlier this week that — oopsie — it took documents it wasn’t allowed to take.
This is partially the fault of Trump’s legal team for not getting a game plan in place before the deep staters in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) — who knew there were deep state librarians? — inexplicably turned a document impasse into a federal case for which the former president may be indicted. It never ends with these people.
The point is that Trump could have requested a special master before NARA made it a federal case. Not that anyone foresaw such a bizarre turn of events. Now, the feds will argue that they’ve already done the job of the special master, so the matter is moot. This is a ghastly outcome if it happens. Judge Cannon has taken the issue of a special master under advisement.
Trump also didn’t officially assert privilege over documents during the raid, but, on the other hand, his attorneys were locked out of the FBI’s raid party.
Related: ‘Irredeemably Corrupt’ FBI Stages Photo to ‘Prove’ Trump Shouldn’t Get Documents Back
And as an added bonus, the DOJ attorneys, desperate to get Trump on any real or imagined contretemps already read everything. Reminder: these are the unethical people who knew that the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian secret agent was a Hillary Clinton campaign hoax but went on with the investigation anyway at great personal cost to Trump and to the country. They also knew that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a national security disaster but ordered it censored by social media companies, according to Facebook/Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
The Wall Street Journal reported that there were some tense moments during arguments:
“We need respectfully to lower the temperature on both sides,” said Chris Kise, a former Florida solicitor general with ties to the GOP who was added this week to the former president’s legal team.
Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s lead attorney on the case, said Mr. Trump wasn’t entitled to appointment of a special master because the classified and presidential records seized didn’t belong to him, but rather to the U.S.
“He is no longer the president,” said Mr. Bratt, chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section. “And because he is no longer the president, he had no right to take those documents.”
But the legal dance continues, and Trump will need to plus-up his presidential records act and constitutional lawyers because this will be about more than Orange Man Bad stuff. Now we’re talking about an executive authority precedent for all future presidents. It’s about the past too, if you consider that Joe Biden started this when he retroactively waived the former president’s authority to declare and retain “privileged” documents.
This is real banana republic stuff.
Grab your hats and boas fellas.
Cue Carmen Miranda.
Miss Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda, till today influencing media and getting homages after her, her looks are beyond legendary pic.twitter.com/BtaWekwHrJ
— bling bling it's Jonghyun (@Midgnightsky) August 31, 2022
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