I'll have the loser combo plate and a Diet Coke, please

We have waited for Trump's steady diet of losses for six years. Well, it's here.

This is what it sounds like when a Circuit Court of Appeals slams the door on you: “The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”

The decision that came down last night against Donald Trump by the 11th Circuit was unanimous.  Before the court’s recent decisions against him, Trump would have described the two judges on the panel he had appointed to the bench as “mine,” the same way he described as “mine” the hundreds of classified documents he had squirreled away in a dank basement of Mar a Lago and in a drawer of his own desk.  Last night in its 21-page decision, the 11th Circuit all but told him, no they’re not, and no we’re not.

I’ve been down the various rabbit holes the DOJ and the 11th Circuit have wandered through because a single federal judge in Florida, the execrable Aileen Cannon, took it upon herself to step out of her judicial robes and take on what is constitutionally the job of the executive branch, namely, making decisions about whether to undertake an investigation of a citizen for committing a federal crime.  Judge Cannon figured she knew better than the Attorney General of the United States, whose job it is to investigate federal crimes, so she threw a series of roadblocks in front of the Department of Justice, which was attempting to determine why in God’s name Donald Trump had taken some 22,000 documents owned by the federal government to his home and office in Palm Beach, Florida, and what he did with them.

Judge Cannon put a hold on the DOJ’s use of the documents, all 22,000 of them, as evidence in its investigation, and turned them over to a special master in Brooklyn, of all places, to review the whole lot of them to see if any were subject to either attorney-client or executive privilege protections. 

The DOJ quickly got the 11th Circuit to step in and remove from the special master review the hundreds of classified documents found in the possession of the former president by pointing out the obvious:  they had markings on them bearing several levels of classification by the federal government which clearly labeled them as property of the government.  The DOJ’s second appeal, asking that the entire process of the special master review be halted and all of the documents be returned to its investigation, is the one which the 11th Circuit ruled on last night.  To put it mildly, it wasn’t a good night for Judge Cannon.  The 11th Circuit found she lacked jurisdiction and basically said that her entire “theory of the case” was laughable on its face.