"Isn't that special?"
Maybe Judge Cannon should appoint the SNL Church Lady as special master to examine the documents seized from Mar a Lago, because she’s going to have a hell of a time finding anybody else to do it in South Florida. Trump wants a so-called special master appointed by the court to examine the documents he took from the White House to see if any of them are subject to attorney-client privilege, and not only that, to see if they come under the umbrella of executive privilege, a protection which has been provided to presidents in recent decades regarding their communications with White House aides and other officials in the Executive Branch of government.
The entire Trump argument is specious for the following reasons:
(1) The DOJ has already informed the court that a Privilege Team of lawyers in the department has examined all the documents seized at Mar a Lago by the FBI, as well as the documents Trump turned over to the National Archives in February and the few classified documents his lawyer Christina Bobb handed over to DOJ officials during their visit to the Trump Palm Beach compound in June. The Privilege Team identified 60 documents that fall under attorney-client privilege and immediately segregated them from the other documents so they cannot be used as part of the DOJ’s criminal investigation of Trump’s handling of all the materials he took with him from the White House on January 20, 2021. The judge has been informed of this in two filings by the DOJ, one last weekend and the other late Tuesday night.
(2) Former presidents do not enjoy the protections of executive privilege because they are no longer in charge of the Executive Branch and thus have no reason to have communications with aides and other officials working for the government. Any communications that happened between Trump and his aides or other officials before he left office would be subject to protections of the executive privilege only if the current president, Joe Biden, were to agree that they are subject to that protection. Biden has not reviewed the documents taken from the White House by Trump to Florida, so there is no way he could determine if they should be protected by executive privilege.
No special master has ever, in the history of this country, been appointed by a federal judge to examine materials as to whether they fall under the protections of executive privilege. How could a lawyer or lawyers from Florida or anywhere else for that matter be able to make this determination? First, anyone appointed by the judge to serve in this capacity would have to already have the highest level of security clearance the government issues in order to review documents that are designated “Top Secret/SCI” and “Secret/SCI.” Second, documents with that level of classification must by law be handled within a federal facility equipped with security measures that comport with federal regulations regarding the handling of highly classified documents. Some of the documents found in Trump’s office are apparently so secret that they can only be handled within a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. The DOJ has such a highly-secure facility in his office building in Washington. One would have to be constructed in the courthouse in Florida in order for the documents in question to be seen by a special master, and that person, as I noted above, would be required to have the requisite extremely high security clearance. In order to have such a security clearance, an FBI background check into the entire life of an individual must be done, a process that would take weeks. A SCIF must be constructed so that it cannot be penetrated by electronic surveillance, and that involves building a room with special walls, ceiling, and floors. A SCIF must also be guarded by federal agents, and anyone entering must have the level of security clearance demanded by the documents being examined within.
This whole thing is obviously a delaying tactic by Trump and his lawyers. If Judge Cannon orders that a special master examine the Mar a Lago documents for attorney-client privilege, that won’t take long. The DOJ has already done it. If she orders the appointment of a special master for executive privilege, I am certain the DOJ already has its appeal written and ready to file. The DOJ will ask for an expedited process of appeal because the documents in its possession are part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
The DOJ has already examined the documents, so that horse is out of the stable, as the saying goes. The time for Trump to make all these motions was long ago, as early as February, when he turned over the first tranche of boxes of materials he took from the White House to the National Archives. That Trump did not file a motion to appoint a special master at that time argues that the current motion is a delaying tactic and nothing more.
And besides, the law that the DOJ told the judge Trump is suspected of violating requires only that the government prove that Trump had national defense information in his possession and that he had exposed it to handling by persons lacking the requisite security clearances to handle such documents. The DOJ already has surveillance tapes from Mar a Lago that show people who lack security clearances handling the boxes containing national defense information, and they have interviewed witnesses who lack security clearances and have described handling the documents themselves.
Slam, meet dunk.
I find it particularly galling that this judge, a Trump appointee, is bending over backwards for the most corrupt individual in the U.S. that we can identify without blinking right now. He is getting his money's worth. That she doesn't seem to grasp the severity of this is an outrage in a time of daily escalating outrages. We're all exhausted by him. I bet he's exhausted. I hope he is. He is employing all his dishonest tactics of his entire business life that normally keeps people who worked for him from getting paid and other such things. For the many less well-heeled than he, he just grinds them into poverty if they pursue the honest effort to getting the money they're due. Trump is without a doubt the most despicable product of America, probably ever. Nobody else as terrible as he has had the funds to stay out of jail for similar crimes. But then again, the longer he's allowed to rant and rave in print and on camera, perhaps as he proves his guilt daily, he will be the architect of his own complete public demise.
All well and good, but the 800 lb gorilla in the room concerns the 48 empty file folders that used to shield national security contents deemed too sensitive to be photographed. Empty. All of them, and none of which can be mated with exposed and unshielded national security documents found among Donald Trump's personal belongings. So where are those documents. Undoubtedly, those files can be reconstructed, but that's not why there's concern. The question is, in whose hand are those documents to be found NOW. This is a huge pile of shit that has the potential to pass through an enormous fan with worldwide exposure, and with potentially horrific consequences for our country. My instinct would be to waterboard Donald Trump until he tells investigators what he did with those documents. Another 42 empty folders contained sensitive documents that were purportedly handed off to an army officer to be returned to the national security agency. No explanation about why Trump wanted those documents, or what he did with them. Trump's BFF, former Attorney General Bill Barr came out foursquare in supporting the Biden administration. Wonders never cease.