Trump is his own special master

His appointments to the bench are paying off

Let’s see if we can sum up the situation surrounding the decision by a Federalist Society judge in Florida appointed by Donald Trump allowing a so-called special master to examine the documents taken by Donald Trump from the White House.

Trump does not own the documents.  They were taken by him from the White House on or before January 20, 2021 when he left office.  Trump admitted as much when he returned 15 boxes of documents and other materials to the National Archives in February of this year, and when he had his lawyer, Christina Bobb, hand over to the Department of Justice some 50 classified documents from the Mar a Lago storage room in June.  So the documents he voluntarily returned, at least, cannot be assumed to be subject to either attorney-client privilege or executive privilege because Trump gave them back to the government, which owns them.

Then there are the documents that were seized pursuant to a legal search warrant issued by a different federal judge who examined a request from the DOJ that included a long section of evidence obtained from witnesses and other methods as to why there was probable cause that the documents were present at Mar a Lago.  This assertion in the application for the search warrant that was borne out by the fact that the FBI found them where they said they would be. 

The FBI application for the search warrant cited the fact that the documents had not been returned to the government was itself evidence of potential obstruction of justice.  The seized documents, and the documents turned over previously, are evidence in a criminal investigation.  Even if some of the documents end up being found somehow, for some reason, subject to executive privilege, there is no provision in the law or in the rules regarding executive privilege that would exempt those documents from being used as evidence that a crime was committed, such as obstruction of justice or violations of the Espionage Act.