On Labor Day, a Trump-appointed judge in South Florida gave Donald Trump and his lawyers everything they wanted in the Mar-a-Lago scandal: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon approved a request for a special master and blocked parts of the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation.
Among legal experts from the left, right and center, a consensus formed quickly: Cannon’s decision was ridiculous. Prominent legal voices used words like “nutty,” “preposterous” and “oblivious” when describing Monday’s ruling.
Nevertheless, federal prosecutors were left to decide what to do about the bizarre decision. Yesterday afternoon, as NBC News reported, the Justice Department’s plan came into focus.
The hundreds of pages of classified government records seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month aren’t the former president’s “personal records,” and he has no right to possess them, the Justice Department said in a court filing Thursday as it said the government would appeal a judge’s ruling on the matter.
As part of its appeal to the 11th Circuit — where, it’s worth noting, Republican-appointed jurists tend to dominate — federal prosecutors also asked for a partial stay of Cannon’s ruling while the appeal is pending, saying that “the government and the public are irreparably injured when a criminal investigation of matters involving risks to national security is enjoined.”
Indeed, yesterday’s filing was not simply a routine, procedural step. Part of what made the appeal so notable was its specific arguments. As NBC News’ report added, the Justice Department noted that Cannon’s willingness to block investigators from doing anything with seized classified records would “cause the most immediate and serious harms to the government and the public.”
In other words, as far as prosecutors are concerned, the Trump-appointed judge may actually have undermined U.S. national security.
Just as notable was a line in the filing that Cannon’s injunction could “impede efforts to identify the existence of any additional classified records that are not being properly stored.”
There have been some hints over the past week or so that the Justice Department is concerned that there are still, even now, some sensitive materials in Trump’s possession that he’s not supposed to have. Yesterday’s filing suggests those concerns are quite real.
DOJ lawyers, making the district court judge’s conclusions look a little worse, added, “The classified records are government property over which the Executive Branch has control and in which Plaintiff has no cognizable property interest.”
Taking aim at Cannon’s strange ideas related to executive privilege, prosecutors went on to note that there’s nothing in the law that would suggest “that a former President can successfully assert executive privilege to prevent the Executive Branch itself from reviewing and using its own records.”
The judge gave Team Trump a deadline of Monday morning to respond to the motion for a partial stay, though on his Twitter-like platform, the former president didn’t feel the need to wait nearly that long.
In a pair of unhinged missives, the Republican condemned the appeal, celebrated the judge he nominated to the bench, peddled familiar lies about the FBI “spying” on his campaign, pointed to “record setting corruption” that does not exist in reality, and generally threw an online tantrum that seemed to reflect deep anxiety.
But just as notably, Trump once again added that federal law enforcement officials “plant fake evidence” — a bizarre claim that the former president embraced, then abandoned, and then re-embraced.
It’s all quite unhinged, but the biggest tell is the lingering gap between Trump and his own lawyers. On his social media platform, the Republican pushes creative nonsense about planted evidence and declassifying materials, but in court, his attorneys realize that they can’t get away with peddling garbage.
And therein lies the rub: We know the former president’s defenses aren’t real because even his lawyers won’t endorse them.
