More on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents mess as it
surely has become a sh*t show since District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling for
the DOJ to stop investigating the missing documents until the “Special Master”
has done his or her thing independently (ha ha inserted).
The major part of this saga (or rather mess) is the
following key part from The Hill with this headline (all
formatted to fit the blog):
“Florida judge throws
Trump, DOJ curveball with her Special Master decision”
My update and this article’s background to this point: The DOJ
requested the August FBI search warrant after it learned that even after a May
subpoena, Trump’s legal team likely did not return all classified information
the former president had in his possession after leaving office. In the course
of that search, FBI agents found another 100 classified documents — noting in a
briefing that in hours they were able to find twice the number of classified
materials as Trump’s team did over weeks.
Recently, I posted here that we now know that extremely highly classified documents
relating to nuclear weapons is missing. This is now the most-critical and quite
frankly scary part of this saga – those missing nuclear documents – since we
don’t know what happened to them, or in whose possession they are or might be
or not.
My earlier document post is
also here same subject.
This post highlights: You have to assume that at Mar-a-Lago they are singing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”
The decision is viewed as unusual and has triggered some
criticism of District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee who issued the
order on Monday and who some argue appeared too solicitous of the former
president. Cannon’s ruling was largely focused on the optics — arguing
that “a commitment to the appearance of fairness is critical, now more than
ever” — even if Trump gains little from the exercise.
More on that from MSNBC re: Judge Cannon should recuse herself – why? Trump
has a history of filing motions intended to slow down court cases, hoping such
slowdowns would benefit him. And that appears to be his goal here.
To be clear, calling for Cannon’s recusal is in no way an
attack on the character of this former federal prosecutor and clerk for a U.S. Court
of Appeals judge. But this is not a case dealing with a decision by the Trump
administration. It involves Trump personally, as the caption of the case states— Donald J. Trump v. United States of America — makes clear. A judge
shouldn’t be hearing a highly sensitive, politically charged case such as this
one when the party before her put her on the bench.
As is the usual practice with federal district cases, Cannon
was randomly assigned Trump’s case. But if fate had resulted in a judge
then-President Barack Obama appointed hearing it, we know Trump would have
screamed about it.
After all, Trump himself encouraged Americans to think of
federal judges as beholden to the presidents who appointed them. In 2018, when
a federal judge entered a restraining order against his administration’s new
asylum policies, Trump attacked him as “an Obama judge.” The argument was that he was biased
against Trump because Obama had appointed him.
Judge Cannon didn’t
recuse herself and here we are today with her writing in part: “Plaintiff
ultimately may not be entitled to return of much of the seized property or to
prevail on his anticipated claims of privilege. That inquiry remains for
another day. For now, the circumstances surrounding the seizure in this case
and the associated need for adequate procedural safeguards are sufficiently
compelling to at least get plaintiff past the courthouse doors.”
Cannon gave Trump and the DOJ until Friday to team up,
directing them to “meaningfully confer” and jointly submit a list of proposed
candidates. It’s not clear now how that timeline will play out.
An appeal from the DOJ would likely add to the delay the
investigation will now face, but without a court-imposed deadline, a special
master’s work could also take weeks. The ruling is one experts say the DOJ cannot
simply stand by and accept.
Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who worked on the
Justice Department’s transition under the Biden administration, said that
Cannon’s order raises a number of questions, not least among them being the
lack of clarity around her directive that investigators not use any of the
search material they obtained until after the special master has finished his
or her work, asking: “To what extent is that direct utilization, or do you have
to replace the whole investigative team? To the extent people have reviewed it,
you can’t unsee what you have seen. But the ruling will absolutely be invoked
by every Trump ally on conservative media as a vindication of these general
lies, conclusory baseless attacks on the Department of Justice. That’s
unfortunate, because that actually does create a lack of faith in the system.
And it’s an unwarranted lack of faith in the system.”
McQuade said the ruling itself “suggested a little bit of a
favor” toward Trump by describing the FBI search of his property as “unannounced”
and by describing Trump as in a “league of his own.”
McQuade concluded saying it was highly inappropriate for
Cannon to issue a preliminary order saying that she was inclined to grant
Trump’s request, before hearing the arguments, adding: “In deciding whether to
appeal the ruling, the DOJ attorneys will need to weigh the potential for such
a move to delay the investigation in such a way that they are not able to
complete it before the end of President Biden’s first term.”
FYI: Trump is expected to
mount another run for president, meaning it’s possible he could enter office
without the investigation having been completed.
McQuade said about that: “He could shut down the investigation
or even pardon himself.”
As for Trump, well he
reacted as expected about this development by posting on his platform Truth Social:
“It takes courage and guts to fight a totally corrupt Department of Justice and
the FBI.” (Note: He explicitly did not mention the ruling on the special
master).
My 2 cents: I am no lawyer nor expert on this whole mess that
is now filled with legal roadblocks and such, but I know one thing absolutely:
This all is classic Trump and I don’t know how or when, but this man must be stopped
and legally processed for a very long prison term.
He by any measurement surely
is a “Clear and Present Danger” to our nation and all we stand for. He has been
that way his whole life and never has been held accountable for his untold
number of crimes, and now this is the most serious ever in our entire history right along side the Rosenberg case.
The single issue that needs
resolution ASAP is simple to me: “Where are the missing nuclear documents that he
sole and took to Mar-a-Lago when he left office and who else is or may be
involved along with him? He needs to be brought in by the FBI for a simple
Q&A interview session to find that out those answers about the pending crime
that only he knows the answers. That, it seems to me, would be perfectly legal
and no judge could stop that Q&A inquiry I believe.”
Thanks for stopping by.
No comments:
Post a Comment