You know, sometimes life among the stupid is truly satisfying. They strut around thinking they’re far superior to everybody else, and all they do is to wander around tripping over their own feet. And the gold standard for that is the Emperor Numbus Nuttus I.

Today the Trump legal team faced off in court against the DOJ legal team for the first time before Kindergarten Judge Aileen Cannon appointed Special Master Raymond Dearie. And it came out about as well as you’d expect when a bunch of K-Mart lawyers go up against an A-Team.

A little necessary background first to set the table. Judge Dearie was the only name to appear on only the Trump list. Is Judge Cannon trying to hand it off? And reporting says that it was Trump personally who demanded that Dearie’s name appear on the roster. Because Trump, in his delusional grandeur thought he had found a kindred spirit in Dearie.

Why? According to his niece, board certified sociologist Mary Trump, Trump’s mentality is simple, self obsessive, and warped. His father taught him from birth that there are winners, and everybody else is suckers. Dearie, obviously highly qualified, happened to be on the FISA bench to sign a couple of warrants for Trump aide Carter Page, which a later internal FBI investigation showed were palsied and inaccurate. In Trump’s delusional mind, this being played for a sucker made Dearie a natural ally against the deep state FBI.

Unfortunately for Traitor Tot, Judge Dearie is a consummate professional. He signed the warrants based on information in the affidavits he took for granted as true and accurate information. If it wasn’t then that mess was up to the FBI and DOJ to straighten out, no skin off of his nose. And certainly nothing to turn him into an enemy of the FBI. Shit happens.

It also makes him Trump’s worst nightmare since, if His Lowness had bothered to research Dearie, he would have found that Dearie is a total professional. Lawyers on both sides of the aisle love appearing in his court. He is honest, straightforward, direct, but respectful of all sides. He also has a quiet sense of humor, something Trump totally lacks.

And Judge Dearie clearly had his shit together from the moment he banged his gavel down to bring court into session. He started out by respectfully advising the Trump team that it was Time to shit, or get off of the pot. Trump’s lawyers couldn’t keep claiming proprietary interest in the documents, while their client ran around asserting he had declassified documents, without standing up in court and formally asserting which documents he had a proprietary interest in, and which had been declassified. The judge said that he needed a starting point in his review.

This was a stake in the heart of the Trump legal team’s Dracula. After all, Trump could make any claim he wanted in the media, but if the lawyers said it in court, it had damn well better be not only true, but provable. trump’s mouthpiece refused to provide details, stating that doing so would tip the defense’s hand in a formal criminal proceeding if Trump were ever indicted.

Judge Dearie squashed that like a bug hitting a windshield. He told Trump’s lawyer that, in looking at the photographs, they were all clearly and legibly stamped as classified or Top Secret. It was the responsibility of the executive branch to determine the classification of documents. Absent any definitive proof of declassification from the Trump team, the documents were classified, and under government control. BANG! goes the coffin lid.

Trump’s lawyer, obviously not satisfied with a public spanking from a federal judge, went on to argue that the defense had the necessity to see all of the classified documents, in order to determine the possible risk to the Trump team in case of a possible future Trump indictment. Notice how the Trump lawyers keep talking about a Trump indictment? Judge Dearie turned him sideways and spanked the other cheek with, Actually sir, it’s my job to review these documents. If I come across anything you need, and are entitled to see, I’ll make sure it’s made available to you.

And then Judge Dearie put a nail in the Trump coffin. He announced that he wanted the document scan completed In a month, which is 6 weeks less than the Trump team was looking for, but even shorter than the DOJ was requesting. Which tells you something important.

By his every action and statement in court today, Judge Dearie made it clear that he was not some dewy new, starry eyed Trump acolyte of a judge. He pretty clearly sees his job as the result of a pathetic judicial ruling from a Trump flunky, And he sees no reason in blowing the next 2 months of his life on what is basically a cut-and-dried judicial decision. The documents belong to the federal government, not Trump. Full stop.

To be honest, I can’t figure out how Trump has any lawyers at all, other than public defenders. If I need a lawyer, whether for an auto accident or a criminal case, I shut my fat yap and listen to my lawyer. Trump tells his barred lawyers what to do, and hounds them until they do it. That way lies madness.

 

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13 COMMENTS

  1. One of the Trump lawyers, Trusty, insisting he had Top Secret clearance was both hilarious and telling. My mom’s theory is that Trump has already been paid money to turn some of those 100 documents. Now suddenly his access is cut off, thanks to the raid, and now he’s desperately trying to get copies to turn over to the buyer. And, depending on how reliable the Feds’ inside sources are, it could be they arranged the raid right before the docs were going to be handed off. They figured panic, like gravity, would do the rest.

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  2. I believe Team Trump actually nominated two candidates for Special Master. The Justice Department, while objecting to the overall process, then stated that they would accept Judge Dearie and Judge Cannon appointed him.

    I think the Justice Department’s acceptance of Judge Dearie was a master stroke. It made it almost impossible for Judge Cannon to NOT appoint him, and as we now see we are getting a professional process.

    Team Trump now has real problems. If they go along with the process, they’re probably going to lose, and possibly lose quickly.

    Maybe they can order (in whatever fashion I leave to your imagination) Judge Cannon to fire Judge Dearie, or override his findings, but that’s not going to pass the smell test for anyone except the real MAGAT’s.

    • Your closing suggestion that Cannon might fire Dearie is spot on, Ozajh. Cannon’s entire future rests, she believes, on being a Trumpist toady and doing the ex-president’s bidding, legal or not. She sees herself on the Supreme Court as soon as another Repugnican govt takes over. Hitler’s Nazis polluted the German legal system in the same way, to the extent that eventually they made genocide legal.

  3. “To be honest, I can’t figure out how Trump has any lawyers at all, other than public defenders.”

    Public defenders would probably do a better job. Even when they’re heavily overworked, they’ll at least tell their clients “SHUT THE F*CK UP OR YOUR ASS WILL BE IN JAIL.”

  4. I have six lawyers in 2 countries and three jurisdications (NYS, Quebec, Ontario). I do enough stuff that I need them often enough. I always tell them exactly what I want them to do, and then they tell me to shut up and sit down and the tell ME exactly what they WILL do, and what I WILL do (usually, stay quiet and out of their way!) Sometimes I write long letters to potential opponents and invariably, my lawyers see it, ask if it felt good to write it (“yes, my guts feel purged”) and then they tell me “great, now toss it in the garbage bin, shut up, and leave us to do our job of protecting your dumb ass”. And you know what Ursula? I ALWAYS do! Because I KNOW my lawyers are WAY smarter than me, and I KNOW that my job is to tell them why I am “vexxed”, and then I really DO get outta their way. Why? Because they all have more than a decade of school and decades of practice to make sure I don’t make an utter total idiot of myself. And sometimes, they even win in court! THAT is how the client-attorney relationship WORKS. You’d think Trump woulda learned that by now!!!

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