Being All Judge Mental, Con't

As I told you after last week's hearing, the failure of Trump-appointed federal Judge Aileen Cannon in not immediately throwing out Team Trump's "special master" argument was a vile portent:

Here's the hysterically obvious problem with this "executive privilege" argument: Trump is not President. Legally, this should be tossed into the nearest chipper/shredder. It's the current president who gets to decide what executive privilege means here, and the Biden administration has the final say. Trump doesn't get to determine what executive privilege is any more than you or I do.

 

But where Trump is winning here is the fact that he's successfully slowing the investigation into his mishandling of the documents. It could take "months" for the special master to complete their work, you see, and surely no indictments can be "legally" issued while this is going on. 

It's a solid stalling tactic that could buy Trump quite some time to both get the search warrant out of the news ahead of campaign season going into full swing next month, and to come up with more tactics to keep the feds off his case.

Nobody should then be surprised that Judge Cannon did exactly what I predicted she would do.

A federal judge on Monday granted a request by former President Donald Trump’s legal team to appoint a special master to review documents seized by the FBI from his Florida home last month and also temporarily halted the Justice Department’s use of the records for investigative purposes.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon came despite the objections of the Justice Department, which said an outside legal expert was not necessary in part because officials had already completed their review of potentially privileged documents. The judge had previously signaled her inclination to approve a special master, asking a department lawyer during arguments this month, “What is the harm?”

The appointment is likely to slow the pace of the department’s investigation into the presence of top-secret information at Mar-a-Lago given the judge’s directive that the Justice Department may not for the moment use any of the seized materials for investigative purposes. But it is not clear that it will have any significant effect on any investigative decisions or the ultimate outcome of the probe.

Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020, said she would permit the continuation of a risk assessment of the documents being conducted by the U.S. intelligence community.

Trump’s lawyers had argued that a special master — usually an outside lawyer or former judge — was necessary to ensure an independent review of records taken during the Aug. 8 search. Such a review was necessary, they have said, so that any personal information or documents recovered by the FBI could be filtered out and returned to Trump and so that any documents protected by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege could also be segregated from the rest of the investigation.

The Justice Department had argued against the appointment, saying it was unnecessary since it had already reviewed potentially privileged documents and identified a limited subset of materials that could be covered by attorney-client privilege.

 

This assures that Trump won't be indicted until after the midterms, giving him months to get his defenses in place, months for Trump to prepare to announce his 2024 candidacy, and months to rally the MAGA CHUDs to violence if the DoJ dares to indict. What Trump needed most was time, and his judge gave it to him.

And Cannon has pretty much destroyed the notion that Trump can even be held accountable in the first place. Trump has magical powers that prevent him from having to even pay attention to any criminal statue if Cannon's legal theories are correct, stating that even the investigation itself into his criminality threatens "incalculable harm" that supersedes national security itself.

 

Frankly I'm not even 100% sure this gets reversed on appeal. What Trump wants is for the special Master argument to be tied up in the courts and delayed as long as possible, delayed into next year with a Trump-friendly House or Senate, and definitely delayed into 2025 where the Roberts Court will toss the suit as moot and/or Trump hopes to be in the Oval Office again and have the entire investigation shut down.  

 

So, the DoJ either has to accept this terrible precedent of Trump's legal immunity, or risk losing the entire case to this special master idiocy. Yes, Merrick Garland has other evidence, and there are other case open against Trump. While Trump will unleash his terrorists on America if an indictment happens anyway, the cover of the special master argument will be the fig leaf of "legitimacy" that Republicans will use to demand any indictment at all be thrown out, if not directly interfere with the courts to do just that.

 

You only have to go as far as Trump's own social media grievance service, Pravda Truth Social, to see him demand regularly that he be instated now as POTUS and Biden thrown out of office, if you're still somehow confused as to what Trump's endgame is. He continues to expect enough of his people to rise up enough to make that happen. He still expects the rest of the GOP to declare the 2020 election as a mistrial or something in order to protect him from prison.

 

People still think the rule of law means anything when it comes to holding Trump accountable, and while I still think his indictment is inevitable, so is the lethal, nationwide terrorist violence that will follow charges in an attempt to disrupt any attempt to bring this case or any other case against him to trial. The DoJ will be well-versed on such terrorist threats, but making that decision will have consequences either way.

 

As I've said on numerous occasions, we're not even close to being ready to even start the conversation involving prosecuting Trump and the risks involved. The one thing you can absolutely count on though is that most marginalized among us will pay the highest price.