The ruling in favor of Trump by federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon has been a head-scratcher for many attorneys, who say the court left behind many unanswered questions while also blocking an unprecedented investigation of a former president.
“It does seem to reflect a fair amount of bending and stretching of the law in numerous different respects,” said Jeff Robbins, a former federal prosecutor and congressional investigative counsel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/us/trump-special-master-aileen-cannon.html
Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee who sits on the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, also blocked federal prosecutors from further examining the seized materials for the investigation until the special master had completed a review.
In reaching that result, 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.
The Mar-a-Lago drama placed Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in a delicate spot between his fall reelection and his position as the top Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In an interview with NBC 6, a Miami TV station, he downplayed the entire affair by diminishing the seriousness of the Department of Justice's investigation.
"This is really, at its core, a storage argument that they are making," said Rubio, adding, "I don't think a fight over storage of documents is worthy of what they have done, which is a full scale raid."
The filing digs into District Judge Aileen Cannon’s logic on a number of areas, pointing to many of the same issues in a ruling legal scholars largely panned as troubling.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-rages-doj-appeals-special-master-decision-1741317
"So now the FBI & Biden Department of 'Justice' leakers are going to spend Millions of Dollars, & vast amounts of Time & Energy, to appeal the Order on the 'Raid of Mar-a-Lago Document Hoax,' by a brilliant and courageous Judge whose words of wisdom rang true throughout our Nation, instead of fighting the record setting corruption and crime that is taking place right before their very eyes," Trump said in the post.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-716500
https://www.newsweek.com/poll-shows-republicans-want-donald-trump-2024-even-if-indicted-1740831
Approximately 61 percent of Republicans said they'd support the former president if he were indicted, compared to 20 percent of independents and 8 percent of Democrats. The survey of 1,236 adults was conducted between August 29 and September 1 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 points.
"Former President Trump is losing the battle with public opinion over whether he did anything wrong by taking government documents to Mar-a-Lago," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. "But his core support remains intact regardless of the results of the investigation."
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3631583-senate-republicans-point-fingers-as-majority-hopes-slip/
More broadly, Senate Republicans are concerned that Trump’s legal troubles are consuming too much of the national spotlight, diverting public attention from what they want to make the 2022 midterm election about: President Biden’s economic record.
Former Attorney General William Barr said on Wednesday that he believes the Justice Department is “getting very close” to having enough evidence to indict former President Trump.
He said on Fox News that government investigators need to consider if they will be able to make a “technical” case against Trump for his handling of sensitive documents the FBI found at his Mar-a-Lago home last month.
“I think they’re getting very close to that point, frankly,” Barr said.
Cannon’s opinion, by contrast, is so deeply flawed that it’s hard to know where to begin a critique. Let’s start with the unequal application of the law. Although Trump wallows in feigned claims of persecution, in fact he has been privileged by the Justice Department, and now Cannon, in a manner unheard of for any other defendant. Every defendant would relish the opportunity to delay a criminal investigation by having a court enjoin the government from investigation, but that never happens. The time-honored recourse for someone aggrieved by a search is not to have an unelected judge unilaterally decide to enjoin the constitutionally delegated power of the executive branch to investigate and prosecute. The defense remedy is in a post-indictment motion to suppress evidence from a search.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/us/trump-special-master-aileen-cannon.html
A specialist in separation of powers, Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at N.Y.U., said there was no basis for Judge Cannon to expand a special master’s authority to screen materials that were also potentially subject to executive privilege. That tool is normally thought of as protecting internal executive branch deliberations from disclosure to outsiders like Congress.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/06/politics/bill-barr-special-master-doj-trump/index.html
Former Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday said the decision by a Florida judge to grant former President Donald Trump's request for a special master to review the documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago is "deeply flawed" and urged the Justice Department to appeal it.
"The opinion, I think, was wrong, and I think the government should appeal it. It's deeply flawed in a number of ways," Barr said during a Fox interview Tuesday.
