I swear to God, Trump’s Florida lawyers must have gotten their law degrees from offshore Caribbean island colleges so exotic that, when they showed their diplomas to the state bar examiner, the examiner had to look them up on Google to make sure they were actually real places.
And it’s also becoming painfully clear that they’re no more capable of long term linear thought than their imbecile employer. And all you have to do is to connect-the-legal-dots of their Mar-A-Lago documents case to see what true stupidity and incompetence look like.
OK, here we go. After the FBI raid at Mar-A-Lago, Trump sent his legal Muppets judge shopping for a judicial cretin to give him his goddamned documents back. For all of its blazing incoherence, the original court filing of Donald Trump v United States was actually pretty simple, as to be expected from lawyers still practicing in daycare cases.
The original claim was that Trump was the legal possessor of all of those documents due to the issue of privilege, and he wanted them all back. What kind of privilege? Who cares? If it was a word, and you could put the word privilege behind it, they claimed it. They started with Executive Privilege, went on to Attorney-Client Privilege, and I believe they threw in Orifice-Proctologist Privilege for good measure. And they wanted a Special Master to look at every document and decide which ones actually belonged to Traitor tot.
But they ran into almost an immediate roadblock. In their filing, the DOJ showed photographs of some of more than 100 documents that clearly had various Classified and Top Secret markings on them. And pretty much every Judge Hall Monitor, including Special Master Dearie knew that classification belongs to the executive branch, not the judicial. No way The Trumpster Fire owned those documents.
So, in their next filing, responding to the DOJ filing, Trump’s legal pajama party had to switch gears to deal with the classification issue. And the hill they decided to die on was declassification. After all, His Lowness had been screaming that he had declassified everything since the DOJ released the photos of the documents. Now, keep track here. All of the documents were Trump’s proprietary property because of privilege, and the classified were his new prizes because he had declassified them.
Special Master Dearie was having none of that lame bullshit. He gave the Trump team a very short leash in which to provide legally admissible proof that Trump had declassified the documents. Something Trump’s legal bottom feeders can’t prove up, that’s why they went to FUX News.
Meanwhile the DOJ had gone before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking for an emergency stay on kindergarten judge Cannon’s ruling, giving them access to their own damn documents back. The 11th Circuit issued the emergency stay for the DOJ, and did it in such a rocket docket speed, with such a complete spanking of judge Cannon that the Trump team could see their entire Special Master scheme coming apart at the seams.
So, the Trump legal team decided to go for it on 4th and 45, from their own 2-yard line, with “04 left in the 4th.” They filed an emergency appeal with SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas, asking for a stay on the 11th Circuit Court’s ruling. Before you roll your eyes, every SCOTUS justice has administrative duties over several federal appellate courts, and the 11th Circuit falls to Thomas, so that was procedure. Thomas did a King Solomon and split the baby in half. He stayed the 11th Circuit from taking any additional action on the issue, while the SCOTUS debates taking the issue up, but he did not stay the DOJ and FBI from continuing to access the classified documents.
The Trump legal team’s filing before the SCOTUS is a masterpiece of delusional drivel. As far as I can figure it, here it is. Trump was still President when he boxed up the documents and sent them to Mar-A-Lago. He marked the boxes “personal,” which immediately made them his personal property, since he can do that as President. And he also declassified the documents, with a stray thought in the middle of a bacon double cheeseburger, so all of the documents were his personal property. The Trump legal team wants the SCOTUS to order the Special Master to peruse every document, using their criteria, no matter how long it takes, in order to determine which documents should be returned to Trump.
Are ya hanging in there with me? We started out with a privilege case, which morphed into a privilege case complete with declassification of secure documents, which once again devolved into a privilege case, with declassification of secured documents, and devolved into a privilege case, complete with declassification, that now has proprietary interest claims since Trump had magically reclassified them as personal property. Sweet Jesus, my head is spinning, and I do this shit for a living!
Personally, I find it hard to believe that the Supreme Court will even take this mega turd up. After all, Thomas was within his right as administrator to stay the 11th Circuit while the court debates whether or not to take the case. But he’s still got to convince at least 3 more judges to agree in order to hear oral arguments. And this filing so totally bereft of any logical legal or constitutional underpinnings that nobody wants to touch it.
Because the Separation of Powers is absolute. Trump wants the Special Master to determine the classification of the documents, and he can’t do that. Because it’s up to the Executive branch to determine classification of documents. The President rarely if every creates a classified document, that’s the function of the national security arms. They’re the experts, and it’s their employees and agents that are at risk. And they guard those secrets closely. And I just don’t see John Roberts wanting to step voluntarily on that kind of a landmine.
Author Lewis Carroll put it perfectly in Alice in Wonderland when he said, Begin at the beginning, go on till you reach the end. Then stop. And that’s the simplest way to deal with the convoluted filings of the Trump legal fools. Begin with the simplest premise of the filing, follow it through all of the permutations and perversions, and then stop when the filings stop, and look back over the dog’s breakfast they created. Here endeth the lesson.
you had me at Orifice-Proctologist Privilege. I had a nurse practitioner once that did a nice orifice proctology. She was totally professional, but it was a moment of intimacy that I remember fondly.
Thomas on the other hand is much more concerning. Will they state the executive continues even after leaving office. We are in uncharted territory. There is no one to pardon trump like Ford did for Nixon. It never went to the courts. Never has a former president been prosecuted. (although agnew was). I don’t have any faith in the sort of supreme court, they seem to like to make up laws as they go along, ignoring the legislature and the executive.
If Thomas and this court was unwiling to let Trump have his second term (and they were VERY unwilling on that point), no way are they giving him any cover here. They gain nothing by even bothering and they already got all they wanted out of him. They go through with this, they line up yet one more reason for a new Congress to put in more Justices and possibly term limits. There’s enough heat on them as it stands.
Six members of a cult known as the Federalist society will do that including one from a religious cult.
If anything, the rival Federalist Society cult will be flushing the head of the OFM one here. They got what they wanted out of him and he’s bad for business. Look for the former to align themselves with the likes of Liz Cheney going forward. It’s only a monolith with this crowd when they all agree on the same Supreme Leader.
Dearie ordered the unprivileged stuff sent to the former guy, as should have been done weeks ago. The delay was all on Cannon.
This whole thing is screwed. The classified documents were never supposed to leave the room they were stored in no matter what their classification status. What’s so hard to get about that. If they left that room, they would be handcuffed to the biggest marine available. Jeez, get it right. Trump can’t do shit about that.
However, if Thomas does the predictable with him and ignores hos too close involvement and fails to recuse himself from any decision regarding the final determination, the we will know the time has come for the rest of the government to simply defy the court. What’s the court gonna do? It may have been allowed the tradition of final arbiter, but the reality is that without an enforcement mechanism it can’t do zilch. Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, the US Marshall service, and the military all are a part of the executive branch ancd can be directed not to enforce any court ruling if it ever, God forbid, comes down to that,.