The Federal judge, Aileen M. Cannon of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida released a 24 page opinion that essentially put the Justice Department in the same place as Robert Mueller, by trying to to possibly give a past President an immunity from how the law in applied…
The decision by the judge is , and will be, widely criticised by legal experts as a reach beyond legal norms and political since the judge IS a Trump appointment and has conservative credentials ….
In addition?
The Feds KNEW what they were looking for before they entered Trump’s house….
The judge has gone out of her way to justify against a criminal investigation of the past President, who gave her her job ….
Everything else in the investigation was NOT mentioned and will continue ….
The judge did try to save herself by allowing the Intelligence Community STILL evaluate if the possession of the government files has resulted in national security damage….
Of course….
One HAS to believe that the Justice Department and FBI HAS copies of what they have grabbed back from Trump’s house….
The FBI IS part of the intelligence community and would HAVE to use knowledge of the files….
Finally?
She used the volume of material as an excuse for an outside search of stuff also….
Oh, she was magnanimous in NOT ordering the Government to give back stolen property secured from Trump’s house?….
Cannon, a Trump appointee who was confirmed by the Senate a week after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, gave the Justice Department and Trump’s lawyers until Sept. 9 to submit a joint filing to propose a list of special master candidates and outline their duties and limitations. In the meantime, Cannon ruled that the documents would not be returned to Trump.
The Justice Department has indicated that if Cannon were to make a ruling of this kind, she should formally enjoin the department, a format that would permit an appeal.
In her ruling, Cannon specifically wrote that the appointment of a special master “shall not impede” the intelligence community’s ongoing assessment of whether Trump’s possession of the top-secret documents caused harm to U.S. national security. That review, which began in response to inquiries from Congress, is being spearheaded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Such a carve-out for the ODNI, though, could be potentially unworkable because the FBI, an arm of the Justice Department, is a member of the intelligence community and could be consulted as part of the ODNI assessment. A spokesperson for ODNI declined to comment on Cannon’s ruling Monday…
…
She also repeatedly emphasized the extraordinary circumstance of the search of a former president’s residence.
“As a function of Plaintiff’s former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own,” she wrote. “A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.”
Cannon also criticized the government’s process for screening potentially privileged material, noting that investigators twice revealed that they had flagged potentially privileged material that was not screened by the filter team.
Justice Department attorneys said these flags were actually “examples of the filter process working.”
“The Court is not so sure,” Cannon wrote. “These instances certainly are demonstrative of integrity on the part of the Investigative Team members who returned the potentially privileged material. But they also indicate that, on more than one occasion, the Privilege Review Team’s initial screening failed to identify potentially privileged material.”
Cannon, citing Nixon-era case law that the Justice Department said decisively undercut Trump’s effort to cite executive privilege, rejected the government’s contention that Trump could never, under these circumstances, be able to successfully assert executive privilege to block the department’s review of the materials.
“The Supreme Court did not rule out the possibility of a former President overcoming an incumbent President on executive privilege matters,” she wrote….
…
“True, special masters ordinarily arise in the more traditional setting of law firms and attorneys’ offices,” she wrote. “But the Court does not see why these concerns would not apply, at least to a considerable degree, to the office and home of a former president.”….