Update on the special master

I read the absurd, overwrought Trump filing so you don't have to

The Trump response to the DOJ’s filing with Judge Aileen Cannon on her order for the special master is 21 pages long, but they don’t waste any time getting right into the meat of their ridiculous crap-ola.  On page one, Trump asserts that the “Government wrongfully seeks to criminalize the possession by the 45th President of his own Presidential and personal records.”

Got that?  On line 3 of the filing, Trump and his lawyers are telling the judge that the papers he turned over to the National Archives in January, and the classified documents he turned over to the DOJ in June, and the classified documents seized by the FBI on August 8 – all of them, irrespective of the fact that they were all the work-product of the federal government and by law belong to the federal government, well, Judge Cannon, they are mine.

One page later, it gets worse.  Trump’s lawyers refer to the classified documents in question – you know, the ones we’ve all seen in the photograph taken by the FBI in Trump’s office – as “purported ‘classified records.’”  In other words, they are contesting that the documents marked classified as Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information and others marked Top Secret and Classified, are not classified documents at all.  The filing then goes on to contest the government’s contention that “if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified irrespective of any actions taken during President Trump's term in office.”

Gee, what could those “actions” have been? Well, what they are apparently indicating without coming right out and saying so is that Trump declassified the documents during the time he served as president, despite the complete lack of evidence that this is true.