When you went out over your skis

Hey, Trump's team asked for Dearie.  Don't be feeling sorry for them now.

Looks like he found a limit

The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to reinstate Judge Aileen Cannon’s order that a special master review classified documents taken in an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida home and private club. There were no noted dissents.

The one-sentence order turned aside an emergency request from the former president to intervene in the document review.

  WaPo

The decision does not affect the Justice Department’s access to the same documents as part of a criminal investigation. The more than 100 documents marked as classified are just a small portion of the 11,000 records seized by federal agents in August amid concerns that Trump had unlawfully retained official White House records after leaving office.

The high court left in place part of a Sept. 21 decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that barred the special master, federal Judge Raymond Dearie, from reviewing the documents.

[...]

The appeals court said certain documents are deemed classified because they contain information that could harm the national security, and for that reason people may have access to them only if they need to know that information.

Trump’s lawyers had said the decision to block Dearie's access “impairs substantially the ongoing, time-sensitive work of the special master.”

  NBC

I bet Judge Dearie is relieved.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, on behalf of the Justice Department, said in court papers that Trump would suffer “no harm at all” if the documents are temporarily withheld from the special master. Addressing Trump’s potential ownership stake in the documents, including possible assertions of attorney-client privilege of executive privilege, Prelogar said Trump had “no plausible claims.”

[...]

Although the Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices he appointed, Trump has not recently fared well in other such emergency applications, including his attempt to prevent White House documents from being handed over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and his bid to avoid disclosure of his financial records to prosecutors in New York.

Well, when he's reinstated to the oval office and gets his new powers, he'll just have to abolish the Supreme Court.  All lawsuits will go to him to decide.

UPDATE:  Short and sweet

She's relocated her courage

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Cannon on Thursday rejected part of the special master’s plan that would have forced the former President’s legal team to back up his out-of-court claims that the FBI planted evidence.

[...]

“There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant’s Inventory, its descriptions, or its contents,” Cannon wrote, noting that her order appointing a special master contemplated only the government filing a declaration verifying the accuracy of the inventory.

“Should any additional matters surface during the Special Master’s review process that require reconsideration of the Inventory or the need to object to its contents, the parties shall make those matters known to the Special Master for appropriate resolution and recommendation to this Court,” Cannon said.

[...]

The federal judge removed the special master’s proposed requirement that Trump, when asserting a document is covered by executive privilege, specify whether he believed that barred disclosure within the executive branch versus disclosure outside of it.

[...]

The judge additionally made clear that any motions from Trump to seek the return of property he contends was unlawfully seized would be considered on her docket. Dearie, had opened the door to that litigation happening before Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the search warrant – a move that Trump opposed.

[...]

Cannon also pushed back the timeline for the review by at least a half-month, while making clear that additional litigation that Trump will have the chance to bring, after the special master process is finished, challenging the search will remain on her docket.

[...]

With the intervention of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month, the department was allowed to resume the criminal probe’s use of the documents marked as classified.

[...]

In explaining the “modest enlargement” of the timeline, Cannon pointed to the issues the parties had faced in securing a vendor to digitize the seized materials for the review.

Earlier this week, the department said in a court filing that Trump’s team had indicated the data hosting companies didn’t want to work with the former President. Trump’s team now says the issue is the size of the evidence collection.

  CNN

Sure.

Pretty sure Judge Cannon knows fuck-all about what she's supposed to be doing.  I wonder how many little MAGA law clerks are scurrying behind the scenes to provide her with all her bullshit rulings.

Trump lawyers having a little trouble in the stolen documents case

They asked for a Special Master.  They got one of their choice.  They are now having trouble complying with his decisions.

Or she's seriously compromised.  Or both.

Keep trying.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

.

Luckily he has rubes who will pick up the tab

Say, Stable Genius, how's that Special Master thing working out for you?

They not only asked for the Special Master, they chose the person for the job.

Busted

Sleazeballs.  They can't do it because he didn't do anything.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Special Master gets underway

UPDATE:

What are the penalties for gaslighting a Special Master?

Do you need more evidence that stacking the courts was Mitch McConnell's finest contribution?

[Trump-nominated federal court judge Aileen Cannon] has named Raymond Dearie, a senior US district judge with experience handling US national security matters, as an independent arbiter to vet records seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Florida estate in an ongoing criminal investigation.

[...]

Dearie was one of two candidates for the post proposed by the former president, and the US justice department had said it would not oppose his appointment.

[...]

Dearie, who is 78 and based in Brooklyn, is tasked with deciding whether any of the documents seized by the FBI during the August search are privileged – either due to attorney-client confidentiality or through a legal principle called executive privilege – and should be off limits to federal investigators.

Dearie has until 30 November – after the midterms – to finish the review.

  Guardian

After the midterms. That was important.

Trump will be required to pay costs associated with the special master.

No problem. He'll just get the rubes to cover the cost.

The justice department had said in a court filing on Monday that Dearie’s experience as a judge qualified him for the special master role, but opposed the other candidate proposed by Trump’s team, private attorney Paul Huck. Trump’s lawyers opposed the two retired federal judges proposed by the department.

Of course they did.

Dearie was appointed in 2011 to the foreign intelligence surveillance court, which reviews warrant applications from the US government on matters of national security, where he served until 2019.

In 2017, he was one of four federal judges who approved warrants used to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page amid concern about Trump campaign contacts with Russians, according to papers released to media outlets that sued for the records.

If Judge Dearie has anything left of impartiality and a sense of actual justice, he'll move ASAP. And he'll recognize the bullshit that got him to this point.

In ruling in favor of Trump’s request for a special master, Cannon rejected the department’s arguments that the records belong to the government and that because Trump is no longer president he cannot claim executive privilege. Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2020.

Assumptions about Dearie can't be fairly made without background. Here's some more:

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."

[...]

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."

[...]

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.

  NPR

We shall see. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Next up: DOJ appeals

UPDATE: 

There it is

UPDATE:

UPDATE 9/10:

More questions about Judge Cannon's ruling

A legal reading of current law:

The power was granted to the judge by herself.  So if nobody challenges it, the power remains.

Yes.  Yes it is.

Precedent from the Nixon tapes case:

So, even though it will delay indictment of Trump, I believe the DOJ has an obligation to appeal Cannon's faulty ruling in order to re-assert and reconfirm the validity or not of prior presidents' claims against a current executive.  

"She" being the incompetent Trump judge (redundant, I know) Aileen Cannon.

And then, there's yet another angle for DOJ action now...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Earlier post here.

UPDATE 9/8:

Trump's judge came through for him

A nice dleay, and if Trump loses, he can then appeal to the Supreme Court.

If nothing else, all this delays the proceedings.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Hey, she may be on the District Court, but she was put there by Donald Trump (and a bunch of fool Senators) when she is barely 40 years old.  What do you want on District courts?  Judges with proven records?  Experience?  Knowledge of the law?  Christ, you people are demanding.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Judge Cannon took several steps that specialists said were vulnerable to being overturned if the government files an appeal, as most agreed was likely. Any appeal would be heard by the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, where Mr. Trump appointed six of its 11 active judges.

[...]

“Judge Cannon had a reasonable path she could have taken — to appoint a special master to review documents for attorney-client privilege and allow the criminal investigation to continue otherwise,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor. “Instead, she chose a radical path.”

[...]

“The opinion seems oblivious to the nature of executive privilege,” he said.

The Justice Department is itself part of the executive branch, and a court has never held that a former president can invoke the privilege to keep records from his time in office away from the executive branch itself.

[...]

Paul Rosenzweig, a former homeland security official in the George W. Bush administration and prosecutor in the independent counsel investigation of Bill Clinton, said it was egregious to block the Justice Department from steps like asking witnesses about government files, many marked as classified, that agents had already reviewed.

“This would seem to me to be a genuinely unprecedented decision by a judge,” Mr. Rosenzweig said. “Enjoining the ongoing criminal investigation is simply untenable.”

[...]

“Even if any assertion of executive privilege by plaintiff ultimately fails in this context,” she wrote, “that possibility, even if likely, does not negate a former president’s ability to raise the privilege as an initial matter.”

She did not address a 1974 Supreme Court case that upheld the Watergate prosecutor’s demand for White House tapes as part of a criminal investigation despite the attempt by Mr. Nixon, then the sitting president, to block it by asserting executive privilege.

“Even if there is some hypothetical situation in which a former president could shield his or her communications from the current executive branch,” Mr. Shane said, “they would not be able to do so in the context of a criminal investigation — and certainly not after the material has been seized pursuant to a lawful search warrant.”

[...]

In her Senate questionnaire, she described herself as having been a member of the conservative Federalist Society since 2005. Mr. Trump nominated her in May 2020, and the Senate confirmed her on Nov. 12, nine days after he lost re-election.

[...]

Judge Cannon allowed a separate review of the documents, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to continue. It is assessing the risk to national security that the insecure holding of sensitive documents at Mar-Lago may have caused.

David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University law professor, said he was glad that work had been allowed to continue given its importance. But he said there was an inherent contradiction in allowing the executive branch to use the files for that purpose while blocking it from using them for an active criminal investigation.

[...]

While Mr. Trump does not own the government documents he repeatedly failed to return, the warrant permitted the F.B.I. to take anything else of his that he had left in the same containers as evidence of how he stored sensitive information.

Judge Cannon noted that a department report said this had included “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes and accounting information.”

  NYT

So that's why he's so desperate to get them back.

A footnote insinuated that the Justice Department might leak those files to reporters.

I think that would be far less likely than the Department starting another criminal investigation (or adding the evidence to an already possibly existing one).

“To any lawyer with serious federal criminal court experience who is being honest, this ruling is laughably bad, and the written justification is even flimsier,” [Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor,] wrote in an email. “Donald Trump is getting something no one else ever gets in federal court, he’s getting it for no good reason, and it will not in the slightest reduce the ongoing howls that he is being persecuted, when [in fact] he is being privileged.”

UPDATE:

It most certainly is, Ollie.

UPDATE:  Follow-up questions

UPDATE 9/8:

UPDATE 9/10:

DOJ filing lays out more evidence

Read about it in this Renato Mariotti Twitter thread.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The filed document

This is Trump being treated like an American citizen under the rule of current law:

UPDATE:

Making DOJ work for it

The U.S. Department of Justice apparently has a lot to say in response to former President Donald Trump’s request that a special master handle the materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago residence and resort.

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Monday granted a request from Juan Antonio Gonzalez, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, to submit a brief of up to 40 pages “in order to adequately address the legal and factual issues raised” Trump’s lawyers’ 21-page motion seeking the appointment of a special master, rather than the standard 20 pages. Trump’s team didn’t oppose the request, which Cannon granted not long after it was filed.

[...]

A hearing is scheduled Thursday at 1 p.m. before Cannon at the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida.

[...]

Trump’s lawyers, include Lindsey Halligan, a solo practitioner in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, James Trusty of Ifrah Law PLLC in Washington, D.C., and M. Evan Corcoran of Silverman Thompson Slutkin & White in Baltimore, Maryland, haven’t challenged the actual search but are instead seeking the return of some property as well as the special master appointment.

  Law & Crime

So, while Trump and his right-wing allies squeal constantly about the horrible "raid", his attorneys, realizing there's nothing to complain about there, are instead trying to get back some docs before the DOJ can use them against Trump. Does that not sound like fear of something truly negative about Trump in the documents becoming public?

But the Department of Justice also has an internal process for handling such material, known as the privilege-review team or filter/taint team.

Trump doesn't want anyone at DOJ to see something. So, besides truly negative, that sounds like something dispositive of criminal activity.

The documents at issue in the Mar-a-Lago search, however, go well beyond attorney-client privilege issues and into top-secret national security issues, described by the National Security Counselors as an “exceedingly esoteric corner of the law.”

Leaders of the nonprofit law firm [National Security Counselors] on Monday submitted the names and curriculum vitae of four potential special masters they described as “uniquely qualified” and willing to serve, while caution the group is “not advocating for or against the appointment of a Special Master and take no position on that question.”

Link to letter of recommendation.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Attorney Renato Mariotti discusses the DOJ filing.