Timely and interesting article here from VOX. The USSC (again) shoots down Trump’s challenge to justice
with this story headline:
“The Supreme Court just shut down
Trump’s last-ditch effort to sabotage the Mar-a-Lago investigation”
One of the stupidest chapters in recent American legal
history comes to a close.
The Supreme Court handed down a very brief, unsigned order on denying former Trump’s most recent attempt to undermine a criminal investigation into classified documents that the FBI recovered from Mar-a-Lago in their August raid.
Technically,
the litigation over the documents seized by the FBI — a lawsuit known as Trump
v. United States — remains ongoing. But Trump already
suffered a big loss in a federal appeals court, which restored the
FBI’s ability to criminally investigate him. And even if Trump had prevailed in
the Supreme Court, which he did not, his lawyers sought such a narrow
modification of the appeals court’s order that it’s unclear how this
modification would have mattered.
This all began when the FBI seized several boxes from Mar-a-Lago, including 103 classified documents with some marked TOP SECRET/SCI which is the highest level, as part of an investigation into Trump’s potential violations of The Espionage Act, among other things.
Last month, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee to
a federal trial court in Florida, appointed another federal judge (Judge Raymond
Dearie) as a “Special Master” to review
the seized documents and help determine whether some of them are
protected by attorney-client or executive privilege.
Significantly, Cannon at
the same time prohibited the FBI from using the seized classified documents in
a criminal investigation against Trump. Cannon’s order appointing Judge Dearie remains
in effect, as does her order instructing him to screen any non-classified
documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
In late September, however,
a federal appeals court blocked the parts of Cannon’s order that prevented the
FBI from continuing its criminal investigation.
That appeals court
decision, which was joined
by two judges also appointed by Trump, was extraordinarily dismissive of
Cannon’s original order — pointing out over a dozen errors in Cannon’s
reasoning.
Among other things, the appeals court faulted Cannon for
suggesting that a former government official could have a personal interest in
retaining classified documents, and it also criticized Cannon for ordering the
government to show these documents to people who do not need to know the
information contained in them.
In the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers filed a bizarre
application asking the Court to reinstate the parts of Cannon’s order that
required Dearie to review the classified documents, but not the parts of her
original order that halted the criminal investigation into Trump. It is unclear
how, exactly, Trump hoped to benefit from such limited relief.
In any event, he won’t receive even the very narrow relief
he sought from the justices. No
justice publicly indicated his or her dissent from the Court’s order
denying relief to Trump — not even Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously
dissented from the Court’s decision to allow the J-6 House committee to
obtain certain Trump White House documents.
This decision and the previous decision in the J-6 committee
case suggest that the Supreme Court will not take extraordinary steps to
protect Trump from investigations now that he is no longer president.
But, before Trump left office, the Court did hand him a
significant victory in Trump v.
Mazars (2020), which effectively shielded him from a House
investigation into his personal finances until after the 2020 election. That
decision, which departed
from previous decisions holding that the House has broad authority to
conduct such investigations.
That seemed to suggest that
the Court now dominated by Republican appointees was unusually protective of Trump
while he remained president, but with this decision, the justices have now
twice signaled that they will not protect Citizen Trump in the same way they
did President Trump.
Also, this Supreme Court
order almost certainly is the end of the line for Trump’s efforts to sabotage
the Mar-a-Lago investigation by convincing Cannon to micromanage it.
While Cannon’s appointment
of Dearie remains valid, the DOJ now has full access to the classified
documents that allegedly incriminate Trump.
And it’s not even clear that any of the non-classified
documents that will still be reviewed by Dearie are relevant to any potential
criminal charges against Trump. While the need to work with Judge Dearie (and Judge
Cannon) may prove to be an ongoing headache for DOJ lawyers, it is unlikely to
impact the DOJ’s ability to bring criminal charges against Trump should it
choose to do so.
My 2 Cents: This a very
excellent Supreme Court ruling and timely, too. It shows to a certain extent at
least on this issue that they will not protect Trump at the expense of justice
and damage our rock solid principle that “no one is above the law.”
Now we wait to see the
outcome of the DOJ’s findings and in my view and that of many intelligence
experts, Trump to be indicted and prosecuted and tried and sentence to jail
since one key national security question remains unanswered: Where are the
TS/SCI documents and what damage may have already been inflicted on us.
Stay tuned – we shall see.
Thanks for stopping by.
No comments:
Post a Comment