Trump bullshit update

I follow his antics so you don't have to

I’ll just bet you couldn’t have seen this coming:  In his first hearing about the 11,000 government documents Trump took with him to Mar a Lago when he left the White House in January of 2020, Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master appointed by Trump’s own special pet judge, Aileen Cannon, has expressed frustration and impatience with the way Trump’s lawyers are proceeding. 

The special master is supposed to be reviewing the documents to determine whether any of them qualify for protection by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.  The telephone conference today was concerned with only a small batch of documents that had already been set aside by the DOJ’s “filter team,” a group of prosecutors and agents who had previously been separated from the main team of DOJ prosecutors and FBI investigators conducting the criminal investigation of Trump.  They had been tasked with reviewing the documents before the special master was appointed.  The group had determined that a set of the documents might be subject to attorney-client or executive privilege and collected them for further review.

The first issue raised by Judge Dearie was a discrepancy about the number of documents under review.  Trump’s lawyers had previously told Dearie that the 11,000 documents consisted of about 200,000 pages.  Today it emerged that the actual page count was only 21,792.  A lawyer for the DOJ explained that the larger number was provided by a company that had been hired to scan the documents into a database that could be shared with both Trump’s lawyers and DOJ attorneys. 

Moving on, Judge Dearie complained that a log of the documents over which Trump is seeking to claim either attorney-client or executive privilege that had been submitted by Trump’s lawyers had not provided enough information for the judge to determine the grounds for the privilege being claimed.